The Dragonslayers
Grade 4-6?Fourteen-year-old Princess Wilhelmina, the "most willful person anyone in the kingdom had ever met," wants to kill a dragon herself, more to prevent the indignity of being married off to a dragonslayer than to save the kingdom. Predicated on a rather gruesome grudge (the witch Grizelda has lost her husband and son to the king's war and creates a dragon to murder the king's child), the story builds to the confrontation between the beast and two sets of slayers: an elderly squire and his page, and a disguised Willie and her talking bear. The adventure is confused by some mysterious family ties, spirits of the forest, a remorseful witch, and repentant royalty. Some of the dialogue is pretty sharp-tongued, but occasionally it is downright mystical. Young readers will enjoy the intrigue, laugh at the banter between Willie and her sexist companions, and accept the weird conflation that brings everyone together. For those who are familiar with Patricia Wrede's masterly "Enchanted Forest Chronicles" (Harcourt), Coville's title may seem like a sort of lead-in for preteens. Like Wrede's books, The Dragonslayers is at its best when the feisty heroine is demolishing the proper princess role. The pencil drawings (one per chapter) are sufficiently dragonly and the cover is terrific.?John Sigwald, Unger Memorial Library, Plainview, TXCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.