Category — "Boy" Books

Hands down, Cressida Cowell’s adventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III have been my favorite bedtime reads with my 9-year-old that we’ve done in our 3-year history of reading chapter books. And we’ve read a lot of books that way. Some, we’ve had to give up on the reading-out-loud midstream, as they’ve been too, too long and we realized we just wanted it over with (most recently Dragon Rider, by Cornelia Funke fit this bill). But that hasn’t happened once with the Hiccup books – although my son did jump the gun and read the last one in one night without me since he couldn’t wait to see what happened!

The reason these books, starting with How to Train a Dragon (book 1), moving up to How to Ride a Dragon’s Storm (this is the UK title for book 7; it may be changed once it’s put out in the U.S.), are so great is that Hiccup, the hero of the books, is a fantastic character. The books take place when the Vikings ruled the seas (although this should *not* be considered historical fiction. I mean, I guess it is, but it’s pretty loosely based on those times and most of the details are comical and stereotypical as opposed to accurate), and Hiccup’s father, Stoick the Vast, is the ruler of all the Vikings in his tribe: the Hairy Hooligans. Hiccup is the heir to this throne, but he is nothing like his father. He’s skinny, weak, a bit timid, and most unlikely to lead anyone into battle. But he is smart, and we know he eventually grows up to be a great leader because the books are presented as his grown-up accounts of how he came to rule his Viking tribe.

These books are funny, poignant, and fast-moving – all qualities I *love* in a book. Someone I work with says that I’m secretly a 10-year-old boy because of my taste in chapter books, but I think it’s that I have little boys in my house and I see no need to read books that will bore them! There’s so much great stuff out there, like the Hiccup Horrendous Haddock series, that we don’t need to waste our time reading anything but the best!

And…apparently they’re making a movie of this book, which is very fun! It’ll come out in 2010, so if you give the little boy in your life this series now, he’ll have them all read by the time the movie comes out. Or if he’s anything like my son, he’ll have them read by the end of January!