This is the story of a smallish Viking with a longish name. His name was Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the Hope and Heir to the Tribe of the Hairy
Hooligans, and he was the son of chief Stoick the Vast. He was trying to pass Initiation and become a member of the Hairy Hooligan tribe, but it didn’t seem likely that a skinny 13 year old boy could catch a deadly dragon and train it in the space of 4 months. Hiccup and his friend Fishlegs as well as eight other boys including Snotlout, Dogsbreath the Duhbrain, Clueless and Tuffnut Jnr were to climb up a towering cliff, head into a cave containing three thousand young hibernating dragons, pick the one they wanted and catch it before it caught them. Hiccup managed to get out of the cave alive with a tiny little dragon that didn’t have any teeth or sharp claws or anything cool like that. Hiccup set to work training his dragon (which he named Toothless) but it never listened to him.
When Initiation day finally arrived, Toothless made all of the Hooligan boys’ dragons as well as the nearby tribe of Meatheads’dragons to viciously attack each other. The tribal elders decided that all of the boys should be banished into exile. So the boys wandered away. Meanwhile, an enormous Seadragonus Giganticus Maximus, twenty times the size of a blue whale, washed onto the beach near the Hooligan Village. The members of the Hooligan and Meathead tribes decided to go up to it and yell ‘GO AWAY!!!’ at it but only succeeded in making it burn their ships to ashes. The Hooligans and Meatheads were stranded with a giant, evil dragon that could eat them all in one bite and so they decided to let Hiccup and the other boys save them. You will have fun reading about how Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the Hope and Heir to the Tribe of the Hairy Hooligans and the other boys deal with this mountain of a monster.
I liked how Hiccup thought of ways to try and train Toothless, and I also liked how Professer Yobbish’s How To Train Your Dragon only said ‘The Golden Rule of Dragon Training is to Yell At It! (The louder the better) The End. I didn’t dislike anything. There is nothing I would change.
How To Train Your Dragon is suitable for people who like humour, fantasy and adventure books. There are currently 12 books in this series.
I would recommend this book to children aged 8 to 14.
How To Train Your Dragon has had a well known movie made after it although the movie is completely different to the book. Cressida Cowell was born on 15 April 1966 in London. She spent most of her childhood in London and on a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. She has two daughters and a husband, and has won the 2006 Nestlé Children’s Book Prize Gold Award. She has written 23 books which are read all over the world.
I rate this book 10 / 10