How to Be a Pirate
How to Train Your Dragon #2
by Cressida Cowell
read by David Tennant

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Middle grade fantasy

Hiccup trains to swordfight and Toothless tries to care about more than fish.

It was easier to evaluate the book for itself this time, since we’re much more removed from the world of the movie (not that the first book was all that similar, but it was enough to make it difficult). The book is overall pretty fun, though I spent a lot of the book wondering why we want a hero who is so incredibly bad at everything he’s expected to be good at. I’m not saying he should be immediately good at everything, but I guess I would just like him to have a win now and then, at least more often than he does and earlier in the book than he does. So far, these books entail Hiccup being bad, defeated, mocked, etc. until the climax, when the situation requires something that he does better than anyone else in the tribe (usually related to brains over brawn). But I just wish there could be a little more to encourage him/us before the end. However, I have to admit that the win he does get made me happy.

David Tennant again does a brilliant job narrating, though his voice for one particular character (while great) may have given me reason to mistrust him more than we might have been meant to. I’ll say it again—if you love the movies and are looking for books like that, I don’t necessarily recommend you read these books. But it’s overall a fun, short read, though I’m hoping to see a change in the formula in future books.

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