The story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim

This book... doesn't quite bear up under its own weight? It has interesting ideas it doesn't quite follow through on, and emotional beats it doesn't quite earn. But I would check out the author's next book that isn't in this series.

So. In this book, dragons are attracted to carbon from, like, fire, and always have been. So you're a cavewoman, thinking "hey, this burnt food tastes kinda neat!" and then a dragon shows up and eats you. You'ld think think that would have altered the course of human history quite a bit. And yet, the world is incredibly recognizable. I mean, I wouldn't expect colonialism to have followed the same course, and yet Canada and the USA look mostly similar, aside from the dragon-burnt wreck of Michigan.

Surely, if burning fuel put you at risk of being et, the adoption of the automobile would have followed a different course? But our heroine drives an SUV.

Maybe it's a commentary on global warming, and our disinclination to disengage from fossil fuels in the face of overwhelming evidence that it's BAD FOR YOU, SHERLOCK. Maybe.

Anyway, so dragon-slayers exist, and it's a mostly hereditary position, despite there are more and more fossil fuels being burnt, and more and more dragon attacks. But dragon-slayers don't appear to be genetically endowed, just willing to strap on a sword and go. So really, anyone could be a dragon-slayer. But it's the year 20-mumblety, and this has not happened. Maybe dragon-slaying families are large, but the largest in the book is one brother-sister dragon-slaying team.

I'm gonna try to let this stuff go now.

So, a retired dragon-slayer comes to town, and Siobhan is not super into it, because she's more interested in mastering as many wind-instruments as she can so she can get a massive scholarship to pay for her massive music hard-on. But Dragon-slayer lady says: "would you like to follow my dragon-slayer nephew, Owen, around and be a bard, in the historical manner not really practiced for the last hundred years or so?"

And Siobhan is like, "well, I was kinda wondering what to do with my music degree. Barding sounds good." So she uses her position as bard to mould the story of Owen into tales that will encourage people to practice safer dragon-adjacent behaviour, like not standing around and gawking and taking photos while someone nearby is trying to kill a fire-breathing dragon.

(And again. Humans can be pretty stupid, but I cannot believe that 350000 years of evolutionary pressure wouldn't have at least made sure most cultures would evolve moderately effective routines of 'what to do in case of dragon.')

I was actually most interested in the highschool dynamics encountered by Owen and Siobhan, and let me tell you, I generally find depictions of high school about as fun as getting a full leg wax. But Siobhan was interestingly fixated on her musical ambitions, which became less interesting when I realize every teenager in this book has weirdly plot-adjacent agenda and for none of them is it 'getting laid.' They're just not interested.

I dunno, a lot of this book was 'interesting because different', and some of it was 'interesting because what are you doing?' but then when I found out what it was doing, it got less interesting. Siobhan and Owen and their friends and family team up to save their town from dragons! A community learns a heart-warming lesson! I stopped caring about five chapters from the end, but finished because I was so close.

There are lesbian characters! And, in my head, a whooooole bunch of asexual teenagers.

Also, an attempt to make Lester B. Pearson interesting.