★★★☆☆ Placid but fun

Searching for Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede

In her Introduction to Searching for Dragons, Patricia C. Wrede tells us that she started the Enchanted Forest series by writing the last book, Talking to Dragons. That book starts with a mention of the hero's mother. Then Jane Yolen came along and asked her for a children's story something like Talking. Wrede responded by writing a prequel to Talking -- the hero of that prequel, Dealing with Dragons, was Cimorene, the mother of the hero of Talking. Yolen eventually convinced Wrede to fill in the gaps between Dealing and Talking -- that took two novels, Searching for Dragons and Calling on Dragons.

Thus, Searching was written literally as filler, and, I'm sad to say, it shows. The most surprising thing about Searching, though, is that despite its meandering plot, it manages to be entertaining. In her Introduction, Wrede explains the core logic of the Enchanted Forest series as follows

Early in Dealing with Dragons, I’d started introducing recognizable references to fairy tales and some of the tropes that occur over and over—for example, the princesses always having golden hair.

In Searching, I was even more conscious and deliberate about using fairy-tale tropes and motifs and deliberately playing with them. Fairy tales, folk tales, myths, and legends have a logic all their own, which is just slightly skewed from the normal, everyday world. It seemed reasonable to me that just as real-life people learn to stop at stop signs, walk on the sidewalk instead of in the street, and ride bicycles, people in the fairy-tale world would learn what made sense in the world around them and would act accordingly—they’d automatically learn to fly magic carpets, pay attention if a squirrel gave them directions, and be especially polite to dragons.

In fact, the heroes of the series are distinguished by their creativity and intelligence. Rather than doing the foolish things that characters in fairy tales often do, Cimorene, Mendanbar, and Kazul think things through. They know how fairy tales work, they know what will happen if they do the things fairy tale characters always do, so they think past it to where they actually want to end up.

Searching is like hanging out with a bunch of congenial and sensible friends. They're good company, so it's fun to spend time with them, even if none of the things that happen is surprising or even very interesting. So, even though it's fantasy, it's kind of like Real Life.

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