The dragon in Seanan McGuire’s delightful ”Hoard” chooses to spend her time in human form as an unconventional foster mother for a series of troubled kids.įor the most part, these dragons are sources more of comfort or protection than of danger, and they suggest something else about the appeal of dragons: they can be emblems of the imagination itself, and of the liberation it offers. That may be one reason so many of the stories here feature youthful protagonists: a boy is raised by dragons on an alien planet in Ann Leckie & Rachel Swirsky’s ”We Continue” a girl with an abusive father forms a bond over years with a dragon living in the barn in Sarah Gailey’s ”We Don’t Talk about the Dragon” a nine-year-old visiting her aunt finds a tiny dragon in San Francisco’s Chinatown in Ellen Klages’s ”Pox” (which happily reintroduces us to a key character from her award-winning Passing Strange) and a ten-year-old accidentally creates another tiny dragon in her school science experiment in Kelly Barnhill’s ”Lucky’s Dragon”. That is, I suppose, just a way of saying that no matter how much panel-discussion blathering we might share about how dragons serve different roles in different cultures or what they might represent in terms of deeply buried psychic traumas or current anxieties, they are above all very useful story elements, and they seem to invoke in many readers a kind of irreducible childhood sense of wonder. But the 22 stories and seven poems Strahan has assembled in this stellar anthology make a convincing case that they can be all of the above and more. It always seemed to me that dragons were too cool to be really scary, and yet too scary to be adorable, no matter what the Disney people told us.

I have to confess that I never quite shared the childhood love of dragons that Jonathan Strahan describes in his introduction to The Book of Dragons. The Book of Dragons, Jonathan Strahan, ed.

The book of dragons by jonathan strahan