How to Train Your Dragon Universe

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third is the least promising Viking on the island of Berk: small, thoughtful, prone to reading, and the owner of a dragon roughly the size of a cat with none of the required menace. Toothless is rude, greedy, cowardly and entirely his. The Hairy Hooligan tribe is expecting a hero. What it is going to get is a boy who works out that dragons can be talked to, and who will spend twelve books paying for that idea. Cressida Cowell wrote the sequence as Hiccup's own memoirs, scrawled over with her drawings, and it darkens as it goes. The early books are farce about initiation tests and mutton; the later ones — How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel and the volumes around it — are about war, slavery, a lost king's treasures and a friend you may not be able to save. Around the novels sit the picture books, the school stories, and the tie-in tellings of the films, which take the same names somewhere quite different. The voice is the draw: shouted capitals, absurd Viking naming conventions, footnotes on dragon species, and then, without warning, real loss. Read the twelve main books in order beginning with How to Train Your Dragon — the ending only lands because you spent the opening laughing. The film tie-ins are a separate pleasure and no substitute for them.