Llewellyn’s Little Book of Dragons

How to Train Your Dragon is a terrific name for a series, but it’s a bit misleading. I mean, did you really learn everything you needed to know about dragons from those books? Hardly. Where, I ask you, is the textbook to explain dragon life cycles, how different climates affect different species of dragon, or how dragon lore has grown by leaps and bounds across the ages?

It’s right here, as Llewellyn’s Little Book of Dragons distills everything you need to know about these glorious scaly creatures into a handy one-stop-shop for all your draconic needs.

I’m a sucker for any book that treats myth as fact and really sells the premise of the fictional as nonfictional. This book hits the sweet spot there, treating the reader like an eager student seeking the deepest lore and the most common sense facts about dragons. This book is informative, colorful, and perhaps most importantly, scathingly funny at times. The fact that so much humor is slipped effortlessly into an otherwise scholarly presentation is just another highlight of a terrific book that entertains the adult while delighting the child inside of all of us.

I loved this book — the little side nuggets of advice were an absolute delight — and you can’t help but wish that the alternate history presented as fact in this book was how things actually went. I cannot say enough good things about this joyous read.