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.
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....
