This is a series of four books by Patricia C. Wrede. The individual book titles are Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons.
I should start by saying that I really enjoyed these books when I was a teenager. I don’t think that I ever would have called them my absolute favorites, but I did read and re-read them many times when I was growing up. I didn’t read them for about 10-20 years, though, so I decided to give them another try. After all this time, I still enjoyed the books immensely. I would rate the series at 5/5.
There are a lot of good points to the stories. For one thing, the stories include a good balance of male and female main characters. And, although the target audience is probably teen girls, a couple of main characters (Morwen and Telemain) are clearly adults. Although their exact ages are not mentioned, it seems likely that they were at least in their 30s in book 1-3. I enjoy seeing older adult main characters included in books written for teens. There are also dragons, giants, cats, elves, etc, included in the cast of characters.
One of my favorite aspects of the books is the variety of different types of magic. Dragons, wizards, witches, magicians, and fire witches all have differences in the types of magic that they use. My personal favorite is the magic used by the King of the Enchanted Forest in book 2, which is described as seeing magic made up as a network of threads which can be pulled, unraveled, or balled up.
Another aspect I really enjoy about these books is the fact that the author included many humorous details, such as a defective magic flying carpet with pink teddy bears on it. Book 3 really takes ridiculous magic to the extremes with a number of different enchantments occurring to Killer – an ordinary rabbit who ate so many magic foods by mistake that he at one point became a seven foot tall blue donkey with wings. There are a good deal of arguments, jokes, and sarcastic comments thrown into the dialogue, so that there is hardly a dull moment when reading any of these four books.
If I had to give some criticism of the series, I think I would have liked book 4 to have been written in 3rd person rather than 1st person. This seems odd when compared with the other books. In addition, there is a lot of bashing of princesses and princes in the books, but these are basically the only humans appearing in the books outside of knights or magic users like witches and wizards. At any rate, it makes me curious about what the average normal human person would be like, living in that world (outside of the Enchanted Forest).
In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading this series and would like to read them all again sometime in the future.
星女 