By Dennis Hamley
[Armadillo 5.1 Spring 2003]

Here are three novels, of which two have threads of fantasy running through them, the third has non-stop action and all three have very satisfying outcomes with unpleasant people getting their just deserts.

How to Train your Dragon purports to be the memoirs of Hiccup Horrendous III. Hiccup, though Hope and Heir to the tribe of Hairy Hooligans on the Isle of Berk, is, as Dogsbreath the Duhbrain and Snotface Snotlout aver, USELESS, So he has to become a true Viking Hero the Hard Way. How both the Hairy Hooligans and their rivals the Meathead tribe become full tribe members is to pass the Dragon Initiation Test, which involves snatching a hibernating dragon and training it as your own.

Sadly, Hiccup's dragon turns out to be Toothless, the most pathetic, smallest dragon ever seen. But what Hiccup and Toothless lack in size and ferocity, they make up for in guile and bravery: the story proceeds with funny, energetic action, culminating in the raising and quelling of two specimens of Seadragon Giganticus Maximus at the Battle of Death's Head Headland. So Hiccup is proclaimed Hiccup the Useful, and becomes, we are told, a Master of Dragonese and the foremost Dragon Whisperer. A super story, inventive, ingenious, perpetually surprising. One to cherish.

Molly Moon, like Hiccup, also seems pretty useless as she wastes away in Miss Adderstone's appalling orphanage in Hardwick House, with only Rocky as a friend. But the chance (or is it?) discovery of Dr Logan's book on hypnotism in the local library changes her life. She has the gift and becomes a true hypnotist, , though she can't learn hypnotism by voice because someone has cut the relevant chapters out. The sinister American Professor Nockman is also after the book, for his own nefarious ends.

Molly's gift changes her life in extra-ordinary ways: revenge over her persecutors and an amazing New York adventure. The narrative proceeds with incredible though fictionally fitting logic until Molly realises the true nature of her gift, gains real happiness in the finding and learns surprising things about how it all happened to her An absorbing, constantly surprising, often very funny novel.

Hoot is set in Florida. Roy Eberhardt, lately arrived from Montana as his law enforcement officer father is moved from job to job, is also persecuted, by the egregious Dana Matherson. Odd things are happening. A strange, barefoot running boy, rare burrowing owls nesting on the site of a proposed Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House, mysterious happenings on the site - never quite vandalism -which infuriate Curly Branitt, site foreman, and puzzle Officer Delinko, accident-prone policeman. Then the big soccer-playing Beatrice Leep unaccountably befriends and protects Roy. What can it all mean?

The whole adds up to a fast-moving, intricate mystery, with lots of satisfying turning of tables, a fair amount of humour and an ecological case well made by an expert author whose first children's book this is after a career writing for adults. And he doesn't treat children's books as a pushover: this is a fine piece of plotting and I enjoyed it very much.