YELL AT IT! (How to Train Your Dragon Review)

I bet I know what you're thinking. "Hey, I really liked that movie. Hiccup was perfectly voiced by Jay Baruchel in a wonderfully dry, humorous manner, and Toothless the dragon acted like a weird but lovable combination of my neighbor's cat and Stitch from that Disney movie. But his eyes!  Toothless' eyes were SO emotive!  The dynamic between Hiccup and Toothless was so powerful that neither of them had to speak a word in order to communicate.  I went home and downloaded the soundtrack as soon as I could because it was so amazing, and boy were there some funny moments!"

I completely agree with you, but I'm actually here to review the book, not the movie. Go see the movie though. Please. Not including Pixar films, it's the best non-live-action thing I've seen since... well... Shrek 2 at least, and probably earlier than that.

That being said, the book is something entirely different than the movie, which can only be described as a "loose" interpretation, looser than (I'm assuming) the Dante's Inferno videogame version of the old poem written by some Italian man suffering a mid-life crisis. I'm not saying for a moment that How to Train Your Dragon - the book! - is bad. In fact, it's quite good, but don't expect anything even remotely resembling the movie, which to me was a CGI version of what Eregon should have been and in every way wasn't.

Sorry, had to get my weekly dig at the Inheritance Cycle there. Whew, glad that's over.

So what's the HTTYD book like, exactly? Well, for starters, I suspect that it was written with, say, 10-11 year-old boys in mind. The narration is simple and straightforward, and it is lightly funny, though rarely at a level higher than that grasped by a prepubescent male. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is the young son of Stoick the Vast, who is the leader of the Hairy Hooligan tribe of Viking warriors. Hiccup is not like the other Vikings, who are aggressive and loud and generally enjoy killing things and/or throwing them a great distance. No, Hiccup is small, and thoughtful, and is the only Viking around who has read enough books to have learned Dragonese.  Dragons in this world are dog-sized pets captured and trained to serve primarily as food-gatherers, not mounts.  Vikings are instructed that the louder you yell at your dragon, the better it obeys.  When Hiccup and the other boys go out to the caves to capture their dragons, he winds up with Toothless, a tiny, "terrier-sized" dragon of the most common variety. Now Hiccup has just a few months to train the whiny, singularly uncooperative Toothless for the initiation ceremony, or he'll be expelled from the Viking tribe forever.

This was, first and foremost, an enjoyable book.  Many of the adult Vikings (most prominently the boys' trainer, Gobber) have more dialog set in ALL CAPS than not, since they are always yelling.  Given the target audience, there aren't as many poop jokes as you may think, but there are some (and let's face it: boys don't really grow up when it comes to this subject.  I giggled my pants off during these scenes).  On at least every other page there is an adolescent-style sketch of a character, or a scene or item or something, as though Hiccup himself drew on the pages to give you a better idea of what his friends really looked like.  The scenes go quickly, and it is an incredibly fast read.  I must have finished it in about three hours, tops.  As it turns out, this book is part of a seven-part series that chronicle the life of Hiccup, a great hero in the fictional history of these Vikings.  I had no idea.

It has all your typical young fiction elements: teachers who don't understand, bullies, unorthodox friends who stick out even more than the protagonist, oblivious parents, happy endings.  It's predictable, but not cliche.  You can tell the writer had fun with it because you'll have fun reading it.  I recently learned that the writer is British, which doesn't at all surprise me.  They have a certain wit about them when they write.  Try reading something by Neil Gaiman, like Stardust, which, much like this current story, involves an absolutely fantastic movie and a pretty good but incredibly different book.

I'd have enjoyed HTTYD more were I only 10 or 11, or even up to perhaps 14.  That's pretty much the age group for whom I'd recommend it.  It's lighthearted, and the ending is indeed satisfying, but where the movie touched me deeply (one IMDb reviewer says that it won the "Heartland Truly Moving Picture Award" in Indianapolis, and I believe it), the book just sort of skims the surface.  I would still recommend reading it because of its British humor and fun story, but if you're looking for a moving, human experience, stick with the movie.  I don't know if I'll ever read any of the other books in the seven-part series (the other books have titles like How to be a Pirate, or How to Speak Dragonese, in case you were wondering), but I'll let you know if I do.


Speaking of how to speak Dragonese, that was definitely my favorite part of the book.  At one point it offers a few key phrases, so that you, too, will be able to tell your dragon "No poo-ing inside the house, please" (Nee-ah crappa inna di hoosus, pishyou) or "my mother does not like to be bitten on the bottom" (Mi mama no likeit yum-yum on di bum), or my personal favorite, "let's try that again" (Doit a wummortime). This was only topped, perhaps, by Hiccup's mother's name - Valhallarama - and the fact that her bra is eventually used as a weapon.