Long ago, I had picked up this audiobook for the kids from our Public Library, only I had gotten it on CD, and the very first disc was so scratched and skippy that we gave up before the story really got going. When I discovered Libby, the app connected to our library system that allows for digital acquisitions while using your library card, this was the first audiobook I looked for!

My kids absolutely loved this story, and since I listened to it all the way through (I am after all their chauffeur!), I enjoyed it as well. In fact, I loved hearing reader David Tennant‘s Scottish Brogue so much that I found myself thinking in the accent for days afterward. I was pure fuming! Had a wee time of it!

This story has been totally filmified (though my kids don’t know that yet), and I believe there’s even a TV series (I don’t think my kids will ever know that!), so perhaps the plot doesn’t need explaining. But for those of you who—like us—don’t watch much on the TV and haven’t had much chance to hit the library, I’ll introduce it briefly.

Hiccup is an unlikely hero and son of the Hooligan Tribe’s great Chief, Stoic the Vast. In fact, a number of classmates call him “Hiccup the Useless”…but how wrong they are. He and the other boys are training to become great Viking warriors, and part of this training requires that they capture and train their very own dragons. So after an eventful scene where the boys raid a lair of sleeping dragons, each comes away with their own baby lizard to train to hunt and fish and obey simple commands. Hiccup finds toothless (my kids can’t get enough of David Tennant’s interpretation of that dragon’s voice) who only obeys his master because Hiccup happens to speak Dragonese.

The morning after Toothless gets every student in Hiccup’s class exiled from the tribe, their land is attacked by a mountainous sea dragon (or two), and it’s “all hands on deck”—even if you’re exiled. This opportunity allows for Hiccup and his dragon to risk their necks in rescuing their tribe, and their success allows them all to come back into the Tribe’s good graces.

This is the first book in a long series, and I think we’re definitely going to try and find the others. It’s filled with humor (the names of the characters themselves are worth a good chuckle), adventure, near-death experiences, courage, sacrifice, heroism, honor, and all that good stuff. It’s a story worth listening to—or reading, obviously—and I’m so glad we’ve stumbled upon it.

I’m a bit surprised to find so few female characters in the story (yes….I believe that females exist: don’t cancel me!), but my 8yo daughter loved the story as much as my 9yo son (who loved it as much as his 38yo dad), so no worries there.

We found the sections about “Dragons and Their Eggs” confusing at first, but I figure they’re but snippets of Po-Ke-Mon type statistics that make much more sense in the book than they do on audio. I’m not yet sure if my kids would be patient enough with these books on paper as they are on audio, so we may just stick with audio throughout. We enjoyed it immensely and can’t wait for the next installment to come off our Holds list!

©2021 E.T.