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    Dragonhaven
    Dragonhaven
    Dragonhaven
    Audiobook13 hours

    Dragonhaven

    Written by Robin McKinley

    Narrated by Noah Galvin

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Dragons are extinct in the wild, but the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in Smokehill National Park is home to about two hundred of the world' s remaining creatures. Until Jake discovers a dying dragon that has given birth-- and one of the babies is still alive.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 28, 2013
    ISBN9781470360924
    Dragonhaven
    Author

    Robin McKinley

    Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine. Her other books include the New York Times bestseller Spindle’s End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and Rose Daughter; Deerskin, another novel-length fairy-tale retelling, of Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson; three dogs (two hellhounds and one hell terror); an 1897 Steinway upright; and far too many rosebushes.

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    Reviews for Dragonhaven

    3.5/5

    358 ratings32 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Woaw! I had no clue what I was going to find when I opened this book. I knew I would probably like it based off the dust cover - dragons, duh, but this book was so much more than that. I really loved the way this played out. The ending was maybe my least favorite part, but that's in the scope of really liking the whole. This is not a traditional book in the sense that it is not written like many other books. It's written like a fourteen year old boy would maybe write a book, which is exactly what was supposed to have happened, fictionally. It's a jumbled way to tell a story but it is so right here. Seems a lot of people didn't like that. It was too disorganized for them. I found it added to the story. And I suppose what I loved the most about this book was Jake playing mom. It just gave me all these warm fuzzy feelings. Great, great book. Maybe not for everyone. Defiantly for me. I've already bought a copy for my personal shelves. ;)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is the first book I’ve read by Robin McKinley, and I absolutely loved it! I listened to the audiobook version and I just have to say that the reader truly brought the story to life. My only disappointment was that we didn’t find out how the birth of the human babies affected the relationship they had with the dragons and that there wasn’t a second book.
    • 3/5
      The narrator for this was chosen well. He really brought the teen boy character to life. I liked the concept of the book but there seemed to be too many details and I felt like the book could've been half as long and more enjoyable. If you've ever dreamt of raising your own dragon, though, you should give it a read.
    • 5/5
      Jake Mendoza finally got his wish, to be able to spend time by himself out where the dragons live. You see he lives at Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in Smokehill National Park, home to maybe 200 dragons.He heads out with one of the rangers who leaves him at the farthest camp. There Jake stumbles on a dying dragon who has given birth to dragonlets. And next to her is the human that killed her. As the dragon dies, she stares at Jake and seems to transfer something to his brain. He finds one baby still alive and takes it. He's always wanted to take care of an orphan animal and here's his chance, even though it's a dragon. He names it Lois.This is his story from the time he found Lois at age 14 to the age 0f 23. How he takes care of Lois, keeps her a secret and what happens when people find out. There are those that want to destroy the dragons because of the mother dragon that killed the man. And others that want to protect them. This is Jake's and Lois' story as well as his dad, friends and the rest of the dragons of Smokehill. Read on and find out--you'll laugh, cry, and be astonished how the story unfolds.Robin McKinley has written this like a journal so you become one with Jake and take on his feelings of raising a baby dragon like a mother would. And then there are the unexplained headaches.... For anyone that likes dragons, this is the perfect story.
    • 1/5
      The zoo is so poor, everyone is a fruit loop, all these dragons are fake dragons and only one is real, I work at a zoo that is poor oh wait did I say that the zoo needs money badly yet? Awful to start with- doesn’t get any better when he finds a slimy dragonlet. Hated every minute of the five hours I wasted listening to this hoping it would get better.
    • 4/5
      {Stand-alone. Urban fantasy} (2007)I'm still hoping that we'll see more books in McKinley's Damar series and although I've picked up some of her other books for my shelves, I admit I've been a bit tentative about reading them. But it's been a while since I've re-read a Damar book so I thought I'd give Dragonhaven a go.This is set on an alternative Earth in a similar timeline to ours so, while dragons (and griffins and Loch Ness monsters and so on) exist, so do computers and the internet. The premise is that dragons were discovered in Australia about two hundred and fifty years ago (Cook landed in Botany Bay in 1770, for reference) and some were taken over to zoos in America and eventually Smokehill National Park was established for them to live in, about ninety years before the story starts, where they then kept very much to themselves. They are an endangered species and many groups want the land for development or mining or want the dragons destroyed or to poach them for the 'medicinal' value of their organs or are worried that dragons might fly out and so there is a protective fence around the park which has the side effect of nullifying a lot of modern technology inside its boundaries. The story is narrated by eighteen year old Jake Mendoza who is writing a book about events that started five years previously (and the epilogue is written five years after that although the narrative style doesn’t change).Fourteen year old Jake was the son of the Director of the Institute at Smokehill which studied dragons (he's very insistent that Draco australiensis is the only true dragon) and had recently lost his mother. While on his first solo hiking trip in the park, he discovered a mother dragon who had been killed with only one just-born baby dragon surviving. Being used to animals at the small zoo and orphanage at the Institute, Jake rescued the baby and took her home to raise. But, of course, no one knew anything about dragons, much less baby dragons; Lois (as he named her) had imprinted on him and wouldn't let anyone else carry her; and because of the laws surrounding dragons, nobody else could know about her so she had to be raised in secret from the rest of the world; and she could start breathing fire at any moment.I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she'd fried me in her sleep ... but what if she did? This is the story of Jake raising Lois; the overwhelming responsibility for a fourteen year old subsumed in rescuing a wild creature that no one knew much about and then the adventure that followed when she grew older and he needed to find dragons to reintroduce her to her species. The writing style takes a while to get used to; it's very chatty (hah - imagine my seventeen year old son being chatty; but then again, you can't stop my twelve year old son talking) to the extent it's like my sister and I talking to each other, with lots of asides (in fact, we sometimes have to ask the other person to get to the point) and it took the first fifty or so pages (a chapter and a half out of eleven) before anything happened (Jake discovering the mother and baby dragons) and the story finally took off. It took me a bit longer than that to really get used to the chatty style, though (please see preceding sentence).You don't go near a dying dragon. They can fry you after they're dead. The reflex that makes chickens run around after their heads are cut off makes dragons cough fire. Quite a few people have died this way, including one zoo-keeper. I suppose I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that she was dying, and that her babies were going to die because they had no mother, and that she'd know that. I boomeranged into thinking about my own mother again. They wanted to tell us, when they found her, that she must have died instantly. Seems to me, if she really did fall down that cliff, she'd've had time to think about it that Dad and I were going to be really miserable without her.How do I know what a mother dragon thinks or doesn't think? But it was just so sad. I couldn't bear it. I went up to her. Went up to her head, which was likely nearly as big as a Ranger's cabin. She watched me coming. She watched me. I had to walk up most of the length of her body, so I had to walk past her babies, these little blobs that were baby dragons. They were born and everything. But they were already dead. So she was dying knowing her babies were already dead. I started to cry and I didn't even know it.The story is information dense along the way (although it’s possible - and occasionally obvious - that some information is exaggerated by the ‘teenaged’ narrator); though my book came to 338 pages I feel that the print was smaller than usual so it took longer than I had anticipated to finish this book but I did like the story. For [[Lewis Carrol]] fans, there are a few Alice in Wonderland and Jabberwock references scattered about and are the origin of Lois's name.The premise and the putative science behind it (a lot of which is worked out as the story develops, since this is the first baby dragon to be raised - or even seen - by humans) work. It's similar to learning to raise pandas: I recently caught part of a documentary observing baby pandas in the wild demonstrating behaviours that people hadn't realised are normal - like climbing high into a tree and staying there for a week while mama panda went foraging. They discovered that the black and white colouring is surprisingly effective against the light sky when the baby is sitting high in the branches of a tree bare of leaves. So now they're going to incorporate that into the way they raise captive pandas.Well worth sticking with this book.4 stars
    • 4/5
      Lots of echoes of Diana Wynne Jones' 'Dragon Reserve, Home Eight' - or at least, what I remember of it. Now I need to go look that one up and see if they really relate at all. Dragonhaven is a lot richer and more filled-in, anyway - McKinley took Dragon Reserve and ran with it. Very interesting voice in the story - the fact that he's writing it afterward and reluctantly...I'd like to come back to that world in about 100 years and see what's happened.Reread - but I didn't remember ever reading it before. It's a great story of culture clash - two human cultures (inside and outside the park) and the dragons. Lots of neat questions raised, very few answers - I'd (still) love to read a story set about a hundred years later. It is a somewhat odd voice - not only that he's writing it well after the fact, but that during the events he was pretty well out of it one way or another the whole time. Scientist parents do help with instinctive note-taking, though. Lots of very interesting people, human and otherwise. Darn, I thought I'd found a new McKinley...ah well, it was almost as good as new.
    • 5/5
      The story in this book is fantastic, but I feel I should warn you: this is not written in Robin McKinley's usual style. It is written in the style of a teenage boy who would really rather be doing something other than writing. I think it's brilliant because one of the major themes of the book is the struggle to communicate, but you might not like it as much as I did. The plot entirely makes up for it, in my opinion!
    • 3/5
      I respect what McKinley was trying to do here—I'm sure every author wants to try something completely new every now and again—but my goodness, this book was a slog. I kept expecting the writing style to get less painful and less difficult to read, either as the protagonist (described as an avid reader, though that never showed in his "writing"...) aged, or as I kept reading and just got used to it. But it never did.
    • 2/5
      I think the epilogue killed this book for me. I liked it and found it just fine until we got to the epilogue. Not even the whole epilogue; just the five years later part. I felt like in five years the writing style should have been a little bit more grown up and less like it was written by a frenetic teenager. Other than that I actually really liked it.
    • 4/5
      About a page and a half into Dragonhaven, I put the book down and thought to myself, "She can't really keep up this annoying first person narration the whole book, can she?" When I think of Robin McKinley, I think of measured, deeply beautiful, polished prose - with a kind of intense, crystalline quality that has always lent itself well to the fairy-tale aspect of her stories. But Dragonhaven is written in the slangy, talky patter of its contemporary teenage narrator, Jake Mendoza. And she really does keep it up the whole way through.

      I did eventually grow to like it (McKinley is a wonderful writer, after all, even if this isn't her usual style), but the depth and beauty of the story seems to peek through the clutter of language, rather than channel directly to the reader through the written word. Jake narrates like somebody who is talking a mile a minute and can't stop to catch his breath, let alone go back through to edit and clarify.

      The story falls into the popular urban fantasy genre - a recognizable world of today that is subtly skewed by the addition of some fantastical element, in this case the existence of dragons. Jake lives on the only dragon preserve in America, at an institute in the park dedicated to the study of dragons. One day, seemingly by chance, he finds a dragon dying in the woods - a mother dragon killed by a poacher just as she was giving birth. All but one of her baby dragons are dead, as is the man who killed her. Jake, still trying to cope with the loss of his own mother, looks into the dragon's eye as she is dying and is so moved by what he sees there that he decides to do what he can to save the last of the dragon's litter.

      The rest of the book is about raising a baby dragon. It's about the bureaucratic mess caused at the park by the death of the poacher, and the practical and philosophical consequences of Jake's determination to save the baby dragon. It's the kind of story that would be impossibly dull if it weren't so magical, and in this case the breathless pace of the narration counterbalances the steady, grim menace of the government and the long, slow struggle to keep the baby dragon alive. It always feels like a lot is happening, like events are just galloping by, even though there's no real action to speak of.

      Things definitely get strange when it comes time for the baby dragon to meet her own kind, but that part of the story is too much fun to spoil.

      I really enjoyed Dragonhaven, but it didn't move me the way that some of McKinley's other books have (The Blue Sword, Beauty, Sunshine). I'd give it three and a half stars if I could, and I'm rounding up out of a sense of loyalty.
    • 1/5
      blah blah blah zoo blah blah kids blah blah blah intelligent dragons blah blah whatever.
    • 5/5
      I love Spindle's End and Rose Daughter so much, and I didn't think any other McKinley could ever live up. Well, this one comes close! Enchantingly written from the perspective of a charmingly stream-of-mostly-intelligable-consciousness-spouting teen boy.
    • 4/5
      Quite a bit different from the other McKinley books I've read, but like them good in its own way. I will say that when I started reading I got something entirely different from what I was expecting ... I don't know quite what that was, but it definitely wasn't a story set in the contemporary American west at a five-million-acre national park with dragons in it. The narrator's voice takes a bit of getting used to, too: Jake Mendoza, the son of the park administrator, is a teenager, and McKinley's very consciously written the story as a teenager might have written it. The style is, I admit, rather grating, but I found that I got used to it after a while (though the frequent sprinkling of "like" continued to bug me the whole way through).When Jake unexpectedly stumbles across a dying dragon mum and saves her one surviving baby, everything changes. That's pretty much the starting point, and the rest you'll have to read for yourself. The best parts of this book (McKinley's dragons) are very good indeed; the worst parts are only mildly annoying. Well worth a read for McKinley fans or for anyone who enjoys a good dragon story. It's been fascinating to see the way different authors all put their own spin on dragon-kind, and McKinley's certainly make for an interesting addition to the mix.
    • 4/5
      What is it that Robin McKinley has that other fantasy writers don't? I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with the fact that her characters are so REAL and she puts the reader straight inside the characters' heads. And then there's her uncanny ability to set a scene so totally that even your sense of smell gets a workout (especially in this book). Maybe the fairy of language presided over her birth and from then on she just had it.Whatever the cause, "Dragonhaven" measures up to the best of her work, and also is a change of pace in that it features a male protagonist. I so enjoy her take on modern American society, in which this book and her previous, "Sunshine," take place. (with, of course, a fantasy twist to mix things up)Here, she explores the idea of "What if dragons truly existed and we'd nearly caused their extinction, until they were limited to a few wildlife preserves?" and then creates a whole scientific background for this premise. The story is told from the point of view of a kid who was born at the research institute within the preserve. His whole life is centered around these creatures, and becomes even MORE so as the story unfolds, due to events that I won't spoil for you. "Dragonhaven" is a startlingly emotional, stirring account of what happens when a young person is thrust into strange responsibility, and a gripping narrative of ethical/environmental themes.
    • 4/5
      I found the voice of the main character (who narrates the story) to be incredibly annoying, but somehow just couldn't put this book down. I loved the story, if not the way in which it was told.
    • 5/5
      Ok, it's Robin McKinley, of course it rocks. There are divigations (which people complained of in her last two books) but they fit into the writing style of the main character. And of course it's about dragons, which are somewhat overdone (though not as overdone as, say, vampires). But there is also wildlife rescue, and living in a nature reserve, and... And there's lots of bits where world is clearly bigger than what we see, like when Jake talks about the troubles scientists had trying to reintroduce rescue-raised griffins and caspian walruses back into the wild population. I think McKinley has a particular affinity for talking (in retrospect) about experiences where one is so overwhelmed with a particular thing or task (such as baby-raising) that nothing else is actually computing: "This was what Dad later named my Footman Period. Remember the Frog-Footman in Alice, who, while all hell was breaking loose around him, sat on the doorstep and said, "I shall sit here till tomorrow or the next day, maybe. I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days." That was me. Days and days and days ..."
    • 4/5
      This one didn't draw me in at first, but once I got into it, it was wonderful. The beginning made much more sense at the end, and the ending itself was all it should be. The story was engaging in surprising ways.
    • 4/5
      This was hard to get into at first, because I wasn’t sure I liked the voice of the narrator (which addresses us directly, although we’re not sure why at first he’s telling us the story)—I thought his use of “like” was forced, and I didn’t buy his rendition of the seven-year-old Eleanor’s dialogue at all—but I warmed up to the voice as it went along, and by the middle or so I was absolutely hooked. The pages are dense, though, and the chapters felt super long. I read the adult mass market edition; curious to look at the YA edition to see if they made it more inviting, somehow. It’s also interesting that the book is almost entirely pure telling, the big no-no, only I guess it sort of works because it’s so intentional—Jake’s telling us the whole story, and tells us right from the start that he’s not going to be able to remember all the he said/she said stuff, etc. It’s also interesting in that McKinley has him assume a knowledge on the part of the reader that she knows we don’t have (something that happened in the world that his imagined reader would know about)—this adds to the suspense since we know he is working toward some significant event but we don’t know exactly what it is. By the end I totally believed in the dragons and everything else. Really well done.
    • 5/5
      The synopsis of this book put it on my back-burner until a craving for more Robin McKinley finally drove me out to buy it. I'm glad I gave in to the impulse, as once again, however outside my normal genre, Robin McKinley created a fascinating book that I find myself pondering and talking about weeks after completion. It doesn't matter what subject she tackles, her characters are just so damn interesting!
    • 4/5
      Distinctly charming, in a kind of in your face teenaged way.The teenaged protagonist Jake is retrospectively writing his memoirs now that he's famous, of the events that made him famous. He lives in Smokehill, the only dragon preserve in america, and one of only three in the world. It all started when he was 14 and allowed out for his first solo overnight in the wilderness preserve. It so happened that just where he was camping a mother dragon was dying, and fortunately he was there to rescue one of the babies. Whom he called Lois. The reason the mother was dying was that a rich kid had broached (never explained how) Smokehill's impresive security and killed her - and of course been killed in turn. Dragon's being a lot tougher than one puny human no matter how well armed. The first recorded instance of a dragon killing a human of course lead to a lot of inspections and upheaval. Which Jake barely notices while trying to conceal keeping his new baby alive.It's all written in a first person past voice, with lots of editorial asides from the now much older Jake. It's a very disruptive style, difficult to read. But it does very well indeed at portraying the teenage angst, without the overwhealmingly annoying emo-teen that say Rowling, manages. Obviously focused very much on the symbolic and paired growing up of the dragon and the boy, it doea lso manage to get in a bit of actual lab lit style sciencey commentary - reproducability of evidence and some thoughts on the intelligence of animals. Jake hardly ever mentions any of the other characters and so it is a very self centred book - up until the extrodinarily extended epilogue which covers a bit more of the wider context.It is charming and well worth reading, I suspect best aimed at those in their late teens, but enjoyable for anyone. However I think a more traditional writing style may have produced a better novel, even if it sacrificed the immidiacy of the communication
    • 3/5
      I love Robin McKinley's writing. The Hero and the Crown at the age of 12 (21 years ago) had me hooked for life.This book has a very different writing style from her others. If you are a huge fan of her writing and are HATING this book stick it out until page 45 (at least in this edition).That is the point where Jake meets his dragon. The book then delivers her wonderful description of the fantastic and also the relationships formed in the book.It requires a bit more patience than her other books.Enjoy.
    • 4/5
      About 150 years ago, it was discovered that dragons existed in our world. Since then, they have been the subject of a fierce political debate between those who preserve them and those who see them as dangerous. Jake, a teenage boy who lives in a dragon preserve, changes the debate when he accidentally adopts an orphaned baby dragon. As a lover of Robin McKinley's other works, I hoped that I would also love this book. And I did. I couldn't put it down. A dense but well-told tale about a strange type of parental love. Jake is unflinchingly honest about himself that it makes it difficult to NOT like him and his experiences with the dragons is completely fascinating.There were some frustrations. The narrative isn't always tight because it is told as a "behind the scenes" type of book: the reader is assumed to have followed Jake's story through the news and so there are gaps in what the actual reader knows about the world McKinley has woven.Overall, however, a fabulously fantastic read and recommended to everyone.
    • 5/5
      I'm a huge fan of McKinley's work, and that hasn't changed with this novel. It's the story of Jake Mendoza who finds a baby dragon next to her dying mother and the poacher that Mom killed. It's set in an alternate Earth where dragons exist and are protected in conservation areas and parks, but they're still struggling as a species, as humans are leery of 50-80 feet long fire breathing flying "monsters". The tone of the book is spot on, it's told in the first person and it sounded like how my brother talks. :) I liked the sly dig at fantastical telepathic dragon stories, as this one showed the years and pain that it took to try and get communication working between the species. McKinley's been jumping genres a bit in her last few books, and I'm intrigued to see what she does next (there are hints at another one set in this world, though it wraps up neatly at the end). My only minor quibble is when the story passes from his memories into the present day, it's a bit awkward, but it fits the tone of the story-telling.
    • 4/5
      I love McKinley up, down, and sideways (I grew up on Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword and Beauty), but I had a hard time concentrating through this book. Review is spoilery, fair warning!The idea is intensely interesting - dragons (and a few other mythical creatures, like Nessie) have been discovered in the far reaches of the earth, and a national park has been formed on a few thousand acres of land in the mountains for their preservation and study, although neither is without controversy. And Jake finds one, dying from a poacher's gun - and sweeps her baby away to raise it himself. The plot points were fairly predictable, but no less enjoyable for that - of /course/ the dragons are intelligent, and of course they are at least somewhat telepathic, and of course at some point Jake will be swept away to their secret cave and attempt to talk to them, etc. None of that particularly bothered me, though - McKinley is a good enough writer that I don't mind predictable as long as it is also interesting. What made it hard for me to concentrate on the book was the choice of Jake's stream-of-consciousness writing style (which, frankly, I don't buy as 17 - he's writing this book after all the events have occurred, remember - particularly if we're meant to believe he's as book-smart as he tells us he is - it reads more like a rambling 13 year old). The rambling made it hard to focus and, worse, hard to skim through parts that didn't keep your attention. If I looked away from the book, I had a hard time figuring out where I'd stopped reading to start again. I'm pretty sure I kept on keeping on solely because this is a McKinley.The book, because it's a teenage memoir, /tells/ everything and /shows/ very little, if anything. As someone expecting McKinley's usual beautiful flair for all aspects of story-telling, including dialog and description, that was quite a let-down. I get what she was trying to do, but I just don't think it worked all that well. I can't help but think what a neat book Dragonhaven might have been, with the concept and the characters and especially the setting (which is the one bit of the story that I thought truly shone - Smokehill is a character until itself), had she told it to us in her voice rather than Jake's. That said, it's still better than half the stuff one stumbles across on the shelf, and you could do worse than this!
    • 4/5
      I've loved Robin McKinley's writing ever since I first read The Blue Sword many years ago when it first came out. (Although I admit I haven't managed to read Sunshine yet.) I was sorry not to see anything new from her in recent years and felt a certain connection (totally one-sided of course) when I read her livejournal and discovered she has ME like me. I saw Dragonhaven reviewed by another participant in the Here be Dragons challenge and decided to try it myself. Luckily it was in at the library and I had it in time to take on holiday with me.I'll start with a small negative and move on to what I liked. The tone of this book won't suit everyone. It is written in Jake's POV and in his voice. That means long, rambling, sometimes confusing teenage boy sentences that occasionally run on and on and on. It's a memoir really, but written by a young enough author to not yet have a great sophistication of style. That means there's a lot of description and discussion and not a lot of dialogue. It took me a chapter or two to get used to, but I found myself enjoying it once I got into the flow of it.I liked Jake; he grew up in a certain isolation and lost his mother young and this means he has a slightly skewed vision of the world, but I like it - and him - all the same. His adventures are well described as are his reactions to them. It's all rather rambling, but everything is there and the pacing is solid. He describes himself as being rather "out of it" at the time he "adopts" the dragonet and this is also well shown within the text. He is indeed not quite in a solid headspace and probably wouldn't have done what he did if he had been, making this an important part of the story.Ms McKinley's dragons are lovely. Well described and well realised. Lois, the dragonet Jake rescues, is totally ugly, but cute with it, and her growth and development are well followed. Jake has some rambling discourses on dragon intelligence - whether they have it and what form it might take - early in the book which sets up well his experiences when he makes contact with the adult dragons.Happily, the dragons are intelligent, if not in the same way humans are, and Jake manages to get across their attempts to communicate without words while using words, something that is always a difficult feat.This is not a perfect book - I didn't love it the way I do Beauty or her Damar books - but it is a good, solid read and I'm glad I decided to pick it up. I also find myself wondering if Jake's somewhat tangential storytelling comes from Ms McKinley's experience with ME (and I acknowledge I'm totally reaching here). I have real trouble with seeing the "big picture" and getting a good, linear feel of things which I attribute to my own ME and Jake's rambling memoir reminded me of what I might write if I tried to write a book (or perhaps even how these book reviews come out). Probably there's no connection at all, but the similarity did strike me.DragonhavenRobin McKinley7/10
    • 2/5
      Robin McKinley is an accomplished author; her characters all have an authentic voice. This means that when she sets out to write a gawky, self-centered, inarticulate teenage boy's stream-of-consciousness tale, that's exactly what you get. Some of the sentences are so long, convoluted and full of parentheses and ellipses and side comments, that the reader loses track of where they began. Perhaps this makes Jake's narration more "authentic;" reading some high school kids' creative writing assignments would be authentic, too, though I don't wish to pay for the privilege. There is a limit to the number of times most readers wish to encounter amusingly confused pronouns, the word "duh!" and pseudo teen-isms such as "diafreakingbolical." The story covers about 10 years of time, and the most interesting stuff is the last six, which is condensed into a sort of flat, monotone flashback in the last 70 pages. Almost completely missing was the lyrical prose of McKinley's other stories. Since the book is essentially Jake's journal, and nearly all of that is a prose description of his efforts to save a young dragon, there is practically no sense of any other human presence. There is no conversation in the book that lasts more than about 4 sentences, so the reader has no way to understand any of the people in the book other than through Jake's eyes, and his changing feelings about them are more statements of fact than character development. The dragon "people" are the exception to this--dragon characters are quite well fleshed out and--forgive the word--humanized. There are pages of description of what a dragon might be thinking and doing while interacting with Jake, sometimes to the detriment of the story. For example, at one point the reader learns that a dragon is going to be arriving. It does, and the action moves to another part of Smokehill, where something very important happens. In Jake-speak, the arrival of the dragon takes seven pages, and the journey takes two. The important event, actually the only event of real interest to the reader and the most important to the plot, takes one! Jake's enthusiasm for dragons, to pretty much the exclusion of the rest of the world, is compelling, and at times it's enough to overcome the shortcomings of the way in which the story is being told. It's a window into the head of an obsessed scientist, who cares for little outside his field, and is fairly contemptuous of anyone who isn't interested, and even more contemptuous of anyone who is interested, but less knowledgeable than he is. Ultimately, the book reads like an anthropology text written by an enthusiastic 15 year-old. Only the fact that it was a "dragonology" text kept me reading to the end.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book and didn't mind the storytelling style. Sometimes I did get annoyed with the "conversational-memoir" writing. But not enough to make me dislike the book. I was completely drawn into the story, the human, Jake, story, not the fact that it was about dragons.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of a 14 year old boy who becomes the mother of a dragon. The story is actually quite good and not you're run of the mill boy saves dragon kind of thing, but the teenage boy voice it is told in does occasionally get annoying.
    • 5/5
      Only a great writer can make a story with such an obviously selfconscious narrator work. The constant interruptions in the storys flow when the narrator interrupts himself or corrects his language are in this book a minor annoyance, as is the sometimes too grammatically challenged sentences. The narrator of this story about dragons and growing up is Jake Mendoza, a teenager who has lost his mother. He is living in a national park for the elusive dragonus Australicus with his alienated and distracted father. When he is out on his first lone overnight stay in the park he finds a dead dragon mother and her dying newborns next to an equally dead poacher. He saves the only living dragonlet, which imprint on him as a mother, and survives due to his frantic efforts. Efforts which ar hampered by the fact that noone has seen an infant dragonlet before, and the existence of it has to be kept secret, because it is illegal to help a dragon survive. As the dragonlet grows, it has to stay hidden while the public uproar surrounding the killed poacher is to be be dealt with. When this becomes too great a challenge in the park compound, Jake moves to a distant solitary camp in the park. There the approach of a wild dragon enables the dragonlets reentry in dragon society, bringing Jake - and later the rest of the scientists of the part - with her.