Dragonlore
Ash "LeopardDancer" DeKirk
New Page Books
Nonfiction, Mythology and Folklore
**+
DESCRIPTION: From the earliest creation myths and art to modern movies and online games, dragons have compelled, terrified, and enthralled us. The author gathers a variety of dragons and dragonlike animals from legend, lore, and real life, along with several of their fictional counterparts.
REVIEW: This lists its origins as "the archives of the Grey School of Wizardry," an online collaboration. Like many online endeavors, the accuracy is hit-and-miss, and the target audience skews to modern, younger readers who don't care for depth or analytical scrutiny of a given topic. DeKirk confuses Greek and Latin, oversimplifies several dragon stories while missing the point of others, and bundles real and cryptozoological creatures in with clear products of myth and legend. While the dinosaur-dragon link is tenuous at best - some fossil finds may have influenced individual tales, but overall the concept of the dragon evolved independently - DeKirk can't wait to devote page count to her favorite dinosaurs, not to mention prehistoric animals with only vague relations to dragons. I'm sorry, but simply looking cool isn't enough to compare a dinosaur to a dragon, especially as she seems woefully confused; most classical dragons were quadrupeds, while several of her "dragonlike" dinosaurs were clearly bipedal. Her section on dragons from modern film, literature, and gaming is haphazard and skewed, in addition to containing several spoilers. Why spend so much time expounding on the dragonlike critters of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon and not even mention card games like Magic: The Gathering or the popular online game Neopets, which has several dragon proxies? Why only mention Gamecube and Playstation when many PC and older games also feature dragons as stars or prominent peripheral characters? Why jump on manga/anime series with only feeble connections to dragons (Fullmetal Alchemist gets a nice chunk of text just because the bad guys have an Ouroborous-like tattoo) when discussing modern dragon literature and relegate of the true classics (such as Peter Dickinson's hypothetical "real" dragons of The Flight of Dragons and Jane Yolen's excellently realized dragons of the Pit Dragon trilogy) as "suggested further reading" for dracophiles? One might think that, despite the length of the bibliography, DeKirk was only interested in those dragons which she personally liked, and couldn't care less about providing a truly varied and unbiased sampling of modern dragons. But, I suppose she had a reason for this bias. This reason was in no way obvious to me, the humble dracophile reader, but I suppose there was one all the same. An original story, in reality a teaser for a longer fiction book about priests who serve elemental master dragons, bored me out of wading deeper in under two pages (not helped, certainly, by excessive background info and the overuse of similar-sounding names chock full of apostrophes - marks of an amateur writer if ever there were ones), despite her ever-so-subtle integration of the story's dragon lore into previous chapters as if it were long-established "fact." I also found several misspellings and blatant editing errors, which just made the book feel rushed and amateur. However, DeKirk does gather several dragon legends from around the world which, while excessively summarized, I hadn't heard before, plus she has a more extensive list of named dragons from world folklore than most dragon books I own. I bought it at Half Price Books, so for that price I wasn't entirely disappointed. If I'd paid full cover price, though, I expect it might have dropped to two stars; as it was, it was dangerously close to the line.
You might also enjoy:
Tales of Great Dragons (J. K. Anderson, YA Nonfiction - Dragon myths from around the world)
Dancing with Dragons (D. J. Conway, Nonfiction - Using dragons as power animals and magickal familiars)
The Flight of Dragons (Peter Dickinson, Fiction - Speculation on a hypothetical real dragon's biology and life cycle)
A Diversity of Dragons (Anne McCaffrey, Fiction - The author examines the many dragons of myth and modern story)
The Book of Fabulous Beasts (Joseph Nigg, Nonfiction - The classical origins and evolution of many fabulous beasts, including dragons)
Dracopedia: A Guide to Drawing the Dragons of the World (William O'Connor, Art - A dragon drawing book which invents and explains many imaginative dragon varieties)
Dragons - Truth, Myth, and Legend (David Passes, YA Nonfiction - Dragon lore and myths)
An Essay on Dragons (S. Shana, YA? Fiction - A brief essay about dragons)
Dragons: A Natural History (Dr. Karl Shuker, Nonfiction - Dragon myths from around the world)
The Dragonology books (Dugald A. Steer "editor", YA Fiction - A 19th century "dragonologist" discusses the dragons of the world)
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