★★★☆☆ The First will be Last

Talking to Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede

Talking to Dragons was the first novel of Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles to be written. Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, and Calling on Dragons came along subsequently as prequels.

Wrede was a shiny new author when she wrote Talking. Well, not entirely new: it was her third novel. But it was her first children's book, and she felt she didn't know what she was doing. In fact, as she describes in the Introduction, the book kind of just happened to her. She mentioned Talking to Dragons to a friend at a party as a good book title for which she didn't have a book. On the way home the first line "Mother taught me to be polite to dragons . . ." popped into her head. When she got home, she grabbed pen and paper -- this was long before booting ones laptop was a practical way to start writing -- and over the course of the next few weeks word just poured out of her onto the page. She began with no notion of a plot -- she herself writes, "Until somewhere between half and two-thirds of the way through the book, I didn’t know if I was going to have a story or just a lot of random incidents."

So, yeah, it turned out she had a story. Then along came Jane Yolen and the prequels.

Each of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles is a first-person story from a different person. In order they are Cimorene, King of the Enchanted Forest and Cimorene's eventual husband Mendenbar, Enchanted Forest witch and cat-lady Morwen, and finally (but really first) Talking, narrated by Cimorene and Mendenbar's son Daystar.

If you've read the first three books (and I assume you have -- if not, there will be spoilers) then you know what Daystar's problem is. His father Mendenbar, whom Daystar has never met, is immured in the King's Castle in the Forest. The only thing that can release him is the King's Sword, which Cimorene hid until Daystar would be old enough to bear it. Daystar knows nothing of all this.

I expected this, the fount of the entire series, to be the best of the four. It was not. As you might expect from Wrede's description of how it was written, the story takes some time to get into gear. For the first half it's just Daystar bopping around aimlessly in the Forest, and having random things happen to him. Eventually it catches, though, and there is a story with a dramatic ending.

The best book in the series, I think, is the first one. Cimorene, one of Wrede's favorite characters, is the beating heart of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. She's the point-of-view narrator of Dealing with Dragons, so that's the best of the four. Cimorene appears only briefly in Talking.

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