The Pit Dragon Trilogy, Part 2: The Snatchling

So no sooner do I make that post the other day than I find myself watching You've Got Mail and Meg Ryan's character says this:

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does. 

It was like the universe knew what I was up to.  But that's no surprise.  It's a tricky one, that universe.

I don't remember this cover of Heart's Blood (Book #2) at ALL.  But this must have been the cover of the copy I read because I read the entire series before the second edition came out (which is the edition I own).  I think because I read Heart's Blood the least out of the original trilogy, I didn't have as much experience with this cover.  What I mean by that is that I've read Books 1 and 3 quite a few times a piece, but Heart's Blood is the one I really slogged through.  Probably because there's the least amount of dragons and and a very large portion of the book is dedicated some political plot that I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND.  Yes, I am 23 years old and very nearly have an advanced degree, and I still don't undersand a plot point in a book written for children.

Cue my earlier point about being able to look past flaws in books you loved as a kid.

So Post #1 was all about my love the series and its place in my life.  But I realize I never explained what the series is about.

The story takes place on Austar IV, a distant planet that started out as a penal colony but has evolved into a society with a form of indentured servitude called bondage.  Most notable about the planet are the existence of dragons (which are trained to fight in the Pits and serve as the primary economic activity of the planet) and Dark-After, a period of 4 hours of extreme coldness in which no human can survive.  The books follow Jakkin Stewart, a teenager stuck in bondage, as he steals and raises a dragon to fight in the Pits.  But then the series takes some sharp twists and turns and politics, freedom fighters, mind-reading, and cave people to deal with.  Also, a real-live Strong Female Character, Akki (see: here).

My annotation for Dragon's Blood is as follows:

Born into slavery, Jakkin's only way out is raising a dragon to fight in the Pits. So when he snatches an uncounted hatchling at the nursery, Jakkin must link with his dragon and teach it to fight if he has any hope of buying his freedom.

So in doing an annotation, the goal is to boil a book down to its core, and distill it down to 35-50 works.  Ostensibly, this sounds easy, but it is SERIOUSLY time consuming.  You have to think a lot about the book and decide what THE most important thing is, because that's probably all you have time to say in the annotation.

As I got to thinking about Dragon's Blood, I realized how...unique of a book series it is part of.  The cover for Dragon's Blood says it's a Fantasy (and so does the bibliographic subject headings on the copyright page), but that's not quite right of a descriptor.

Sure, there's dragons in it, and everyone's like "Dragons! Must be fantasy!" But the more I thought about, there's a LOT of science fiction in this series, too.  Each book begins with an encyclopedia entry for some worldbuilding, and it's very science-fictiony.  Talk of planets, the Federation, and starships.

And then it hit me: the Pit Dragon books are a classic example of genre-bending.  Which is interesting, because the first book was published in 1982, and genre-bending is considered a recent trend.  Not that there hasn't been genre-bending before, it's just becoming more ubiquitous, particularly in "hard" genres like fantasy and sci-fi.

Which makes my love for these books all the more unique for me.  Because I don't read sci-fi.  At all.  I read a lot of dystopian lit, but those aren't true sci-fi (and most people consider dystopia its own genre nowadays).  The only science fiction book I've read and enjoyed was the Across the Universe series, and that was heavy on the dystopia, so it had help.

So why do I love these books?  And the end of the day, it comes down to one thing:

Jakkin and Akki.

I've always read books for relationships.  (This explains why my Romance Fiction and Its Readers class is basically the best class of all time for me) Even if a book wasn't about a relationship
Very rarely do I enjoy books that don't have a love story in them.  The love between the people can be MESSED UP (see: my love for Gone Girl and Gone with the Wind), but there still has to be a romantic component to their relationship.  And part of me used to feel like that was mega-dumb, but now that I've done research into the Romance fiction thing, I have ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME in admitting that.

But I'm getting off track here.

I think the Pit Dragon Trilogy were the first books I read where a serious romantic relationship was a key plot point.  Akki chooses to stay at the nursery to help Jakkin achieve his dream.  Jakkin's motivation in the second book stems entirely from wanting to get back to Akki.  And it's Akki and Jakkin's intense connection to each other that saves them in the third book.

These are two people who are wrapped up in one another, and the things they do for each other just makes my heart melt every. single. time.  And for being a children's book, things get pretty intense between these two (not so much physically, but emotionally).

And it's my love for Jakkin and Akki as a couple that really drives my love for this series.  Which is why, despite the faults of the 4th book, I am able to completely forgive it with a single line on the last page.  Yeah, I root for this couple THAT MUCH.

Had this series been written today, there would have probably been a love triangle thrown in there, but alas, this book is old enough to run for Congress and therefore does not fall prey to the YA pitfalls that happen so often today.  It's just two people, being in love. And their love isn't shallow--they have problems, and they get over them.  Nothing petty gets between them.

Despite the dragons, it's probably one of the most realistic portrayals of a relationship I've come across.

And yeah, it's totally swoon-worthy.

I REGRET NOTHING.

To be continued...

The Pit Dragon Trilogy, Part 1: The Hatchling

Whoa, so this started out as one post, but then that turned into the mega post OF DOOM, so I've split it into three (hopefully) manageable posts.

So the story begins with my final assignment in my Children's Library Materials class, which was a genre bookmark.  My initial reaction was to do Fantasy novels for boys, but I quickly realized I hadn't done enough reading to get 10 annotations, so I switched it to High Fantasy for grades 5-8.  I was able to do eight annotations with books I'd read in the past, and the other two came from graphic novels (because I feel very strongly about encouraging that storytelling format).

Anyways, the point here is that this assignment had me doing an annotation for one of my favorite books.

Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen
I have included here the original cover of the book because a) it's hilariously awful and b) this is the cover of the copy I originally read.

Dragon's Blood is the first in the Pit Dragon Trilogy (okay, there's actually four books and it's called the Pit Dragon Chronicles now but it was the Pit Dragon Trilogy for most of my life so that's what it'll always be to me even if that doesn't really make sense.).  It's classified as children's literature, but I think if it had been published now, it'd totally be YA, as there are MANY references to drug use and brothels in the course of the series.  This will come up later.

I was first introduced to this book by my oldest brother, Ben.  I was 10 years old and in 5th grade, and I needed a book.  He said "this book was pretty cool," and off I went.  By that point, the whole series (at that point it was just a trilogy) had been published and I just DEVOURED it.  It had everything I wanted in a book--magic, romance, adventure, intrigue.  I must have read those three books at least five  times each.  A Sending of Dragons, the third in the series, was my favorite.

I read more of Jane Yolen's stuff, but to this day, nothing of hers gets me like the Pit Dragon Trilogy.  Anyways, when I was a young lass on the pre-YouTube, pre-Social Network internet, I spent a lot of time looking at author websites. I just liked to know about books (shame I couldn't turn that into a career OH WAIT).  So I looked up Jane Yolen and information about this book series and she always had in the FAQ in her website that she "considered writing a fourth" book to the series.  It was always a big if.

But for about 10 years, I sort of clung to that hope.  After all, my mom waited 12 years for Jean Auel to publish the conclusion of the Earth's Children's series.  I could wait.  And I could wish that there would be that fourth book.

And then Jane Yolen finally wrote it.

The 10-year-old inside of me FREAKED OUT.  I remember tearing through this book in a matter of hours, and until recently, I'd only read it once.

So when I did this annotation for class, I decided to re-read the whole series.  And boy, did I have some thoughts about it, especially reading it as an adult.  I didn't have as many FEELINGS about books 1-3 as I did about book 4 (which Post #3 will be about).

But I think that's because books 1-3 are part of the mythology of my childhood.  I read a LOT as a kid (and part of me regrets not keeping a list of every single book I read) and the Pit Dragon Trilogy was one series I read over and over and over.  So I can't really evaluate them objectively as an adult.  Because I have been to that world and back so many times that I can look past all the faults and plot holes and inconsistencies.

And I think we all have books like that.  Books we read and loved as kids, but when we re-read them as adults, we realized they weren't as great as we thought they were.  But that doesn't bother us, because those books will always be as magical to us as they were when we were kids.  And even if we know their faults, we don't really see them when we read the book.  Because not only does the book take us to a new world, but it takes us back to who we were when we first read them.  Back to being a kid again.

When you have a degree in English, it's easy to be overly critical of a book when you read it.  It's difficult to switch off that critical part of your brain, because for years, that's how you had to read for school.  It's a hazard of the degree.  And that's what makes these childhood books so important.  They take you back to a place where all you did was read for pleasure.  For escape.

Being an adult sucks sometimes.  And books that take you away from that--even if for only 300 pages or so--are always worth overlooking any faults.

Book #4 is not so lucky.

To be continued....