Doom of the Darkwing: How to Train Your Dragon School, Book 1

After a quarter of a century and more than twelve novels, four films and a TV series, Cressida Cowell’s Hiccup the Viking sails on into new dangers. Notionally, this looks like a new spin off series, How to Train Your Dragon School, presented in short chapters suitable for the lower end of the dragon reading age group, but fans will welcome that little has changed on the Island of Berk or in the wider Barbaric Archipelago. We have moved back to the time of the very earliest adventures, to the beginning of Gobber the Belch’s Viking and Dragon Training School. Snotlout, Hiccup’s arch enemy, has been resurrected from before his reformation, after his heroic death in the main series, and takes his place among all the familiar characters, brought to life once more in Cressida’s scratchy, smudgy cartoons. There’s the same mix of knockabout comedy and improbably inventive epic adventure but rather less of the emotional subtlety that I remember, perhaps because of the slightly younger target age group.