Dragonhaven
by Robin McKinley
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When Jake Mendoza, who lives in the Smokehill National Park where his father runs the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies, goes on his first solo overnight in the park, he finds an infant dragon whose mother has been killed by a poacher.Tags
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What is it that Robin McKinley has that other fantasy writers don't? I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with the fact that her characters are so REAL and she puts the reader straight inside the characters' heads. And then there's her uncanny ability to set a scene so totally that even your sense of smell gets a workout (especially in this book). Maybe the fairy of language presided over her birth and from then on she just had it.
Whatever the cause, "Dragonhaven" measures up to the best of her work, and also is a change of pace in that it features a male protagonist. I so enjoy her take on modern American society, in which this book and her previous, "Sunshine," take place. (with, of course, a fantasy twist to show more mix things up)
Here, she explores the idea of "What if dragons truly existed and we'd nearly caused their extinction, until they were limited to a few wildlife preserves?" and then creates a whole scientific background for this premise. The story is told from the point of view of a kid who was born at the research institute within the preserve. His whole life is centered around these creatures, and becomes even MORE so as the story unfolds, due to events that I won't spoil for you. "Dragonhaven" is a startlingly emotional, stirring account of what happens when a young person is thrust into strange responsibility, and a gripping narrative of ethical/environmental themes. show less
Whatever the cause, "Dragonhaven" measures up to the best of her work, and also is a change of pace in that it features a male protagonist. I so enjoy her take on modern American society, in which this book and her previous, "Sunshine," take place. (with, of course, a fantasy twist to show more mix things up)
Here, she explores the idea of "What if dragons truly existed and we'd nearly caused their extinction, until they were limited to a few wildlife preserves?" and then creates a whole scientific background for this premise. The story is told from the point of view of a kid who was born at the research institute within the preserve. His whole life is centered around these creatures, and becomes even MORE so as the story unfolds, due to events that I won't spoil for you. "Dragonhaven" is a startlingly emotional, stirring account of what happens when a young person is thrust into strange responsibility, and a gripping narrative of ethical/environmental themes. show less
I love McKinley up, down, and sideways (I grew up on Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword and Beauty), but I had a hard time concentrating through this book. Review is spoilery, fair warning!
The idea is intensely interesting - dragons (and a few other mythical creatures, like Nessie) have been discovered in the far reaches of the earth, and a national park has been formed on a few thousand acres of land in the mountains for their preservation and study, although neither is without controversy. And Jake finds one, dying from a poacher's gun - and sweeps her baby away to raise it himself.
The plot points were fairly predictable, but no less enjoyable for that - of /course/ the dragons are intelligent, and of course they are at least show more somewhat telepathic, and of course at some point Jake will be swept away to their secret cave and attempt to talk to them, etc. None of that particularly bothered me, though - McKinley is a good enough writer that I don't mind predictable as long as it is also interesting.
What made it hard for me to concentrate on the book was the choice of Jake's stream-of-consciousness writing style (which, frankly, I don't buy as 17 - he's writing this book after all the events have occurred, remember - particularly if we're meant to believe he's as book-smart as he tells us he is - it reads more like a rambling 13 year old). The rambling made it hard to focus and, worse, hard to skim through parts that didn't keep your attention. If I looked away from the book, I had a hard time figuring out where I'd stopped reading to start again. I'm pretty sure I kept on keeping on solely because this is a McKinley.
The book, because it's a teenage memoir, /tells/ everything and /shows/ very little, if anything. As someone expecting McKinley's usual beautiful flair for all aspects of story-telling, including dialog and description, that was quite a let-down.
I get what she was trying to do, but I just don't think it worked all that well. I can't help but think what a neat book Dragonhaven might have been, with the concept and the characters and especially the setting (which is the one bit of the story that I thought truly shone - Smokehill is a character until itself), had she told it to us in her voice rather than Jake's.
That said, it's still better than half the stuff one stumbles across on the shelf, and you could do worse than this! show less
The idea is intensely interesting - dragons (and a few other mythical creatures, like Nessie) have been discovered in the far reaches of the earth, and a national park has been formed on a few thousand acres of land in the mountains for their preservation and study, although neither is without controversy. And Jake finds one, dying from a poacher's gun - and sweeps her baby away to raise it himself.
The plot points were fairly predictable, but no less enjoyable for that - of /course/ the dragons are intelligent, and of course they are at least show more somewhat telepathic, and of course at some point Jake will be swept away to their secret cave and attempt to talk to them, etc. None of that particularly bothered me, though - McKinley is a good enough writer that I don't mind predictable as long as it is also interesting.
What made it hard for me to concentrate on the book was the choice of Jake's stream-of-consciousness writing style (which, frankly, I don't buy as 17 - he's writing this book after all the events have occurred, remember - particularly if we're meant to believe he's as book-smart as he tells us he is - it reads more like a rambling 13 year old). The rambling made it hard to focus and, worse, hard to skim through parts that didn't keep your attention. If I looked away from the book, I had a hard time figuring out where I'd stopped reading to start again. I'm pretty sure I kept on keeping on solely because this is a McKinley.
The book, because it's a teenage memoir, /tells/ everything and /shows/ very little, if anything. As someone expecting McKinley's usual beautiful flair for all aspects of story-telling, including dialog and description, that was quite a let-down.
I get what she was trying to do, but I just don't think it worked all that well. I can't help but think what a neat book Dragonhaven might have been, with the concept and the characters and especially the setting (which is the one bit of the story that I thought truly shone - Smokehill is a character until itself), had she told it to us in her voice rather than Jake's.
That said, it's still better than half the stuff one stumbles across on the shelf, and you could do worse than this! show less
{Stand-alone. Urban fantasy} (2007)
I'm still hoping that we'll see more books in McKinley's Damar series and although I've picked up some of her other books for my shelves, I admit I've been a bit tentative about reading them. But it's been a while since I've re-read a Damar book so I thought I'd give Dragonhaven a go.
This is set on an alternative Earth in a similar timeline to ours so, while dragons (and griffins and Loch Ness monsters and so on) exist, so do computers and the internet. The premise is that dragons were discovered in Australia about two hundred and fifty years ago (Cook landed in Botany Bay in 1770, for reference) and some were taken over to zoos in America and eventually Smokehill National Park was established for them show more to live in, about ninety years before the story starts, where they then kept very much to themselves. They are an endangered species and many groups want the land for development or mining or want the dragons destroyed or to poach them for the 'medicinal' value of their organs or are worried that dragons might fly out and so there is a protective fence around the park which has the side effect of nullifying a lot of modern technology inside its boundaries. The story is narrated by eighteen year old Jake Mendoza who is writing a book about events that started five years previously (and the epilogue is written five years after that although the narrative style doesn’t change).
Fourteen year old Jake was the son of the Director of the Institute at Smokehill which studied dragons (he's very insistent that Draco australiensis is the only true dragon) and had recently lost his mother. While on his first solo hiking trip in the park, he discovered a mother dragon who had been killed with only one just-born baby dragon surviving. Being used to animals at the small zoo and orphanage at the Institute, Jake rescued the baby and took her home to raise. But, of course, no one knew anything about dragons, much less baby dragons; Lois (as he named her) had imprinted on him and wouldn't let anyone else carry her; and because of the laws surrounding dragons, nobody else could know about her so she had to be raised in secret from the rest of the world; and she could start breathing fire at any moment.
This is the story of Jake raising Lois; the overwhelming responsibility for a fourteen year old subsumed in rescuing a wild creature that no one knew much about and then the adventure that followed when she grew older and he needed to find dragons to reintroduce her to her species.
The writing style takes a while to get used to; it's very chatty (hah - imagine my seventeen year old son being chatty; but then again, you can't stop my twelve year old son talking) to the extent it's like my sister and I talking to each other, with lots of asides (in fact, we sometimes have to ask the other person to get to the point) and it took the first fifty or so pages (a chapter and a half out of eleven) before anything happened (Jake discovering the mother and baby dragons) and the story finally took off. It took me a bit longer than that to really get used to the chatty style, though (please see preceding sentence).
The story is information dense along the way (although it’s possible - and occasionally obvious - that some information is exaggerated by the ‘teenaged’ narrator); though my book came to 338 pages I feel that the print was smaller than usual so it took longer than I had anticipated to finish this book but I did like the story. For [[Lewis Carrol]] fans, there are a few Alice in Wonderland and Jabberwock references scattered about and are the origin of Lois's name.
The premise and the putative science behind it (a lot of which is worked out as the story develops, since this is the first baby dragon to be raised - or even seen - by humans) work. It's similar to learning to raise pandas: I recently caught part of a documentary observing baby pandas in the wild demonstrating behaviours that people hadn't realised are normal - like climbing high into a tree and staying there for a week while mama panda went foraging. They discovered that the black and white colouring is surprisingly effective against the light sky when the baby is sitting high in the branches of a tree bare of leaves. So now they're going to incorporate that into the way they raise captive pandas.
Well worth sticking with this book.
April 2021
4 stars show less
I'm still hoping that we'll see more books in McKinley's Damar series and although I've picked up some of her other books for my shelves, I admit I've been a bit tentative about reading them. But it's been a while since I've re-read a Damar book so I thought I'd give Dragonhaven a go.
This is set on an alternative Earth in a similar timeline to ours so, while dragons (and griffins and Loch Ness monsters and so on) exist, so do computers and the internet. The premise is that dragons were discovered in Australia about two hundred and fifty years ago (Cook landed in Botany Bay in 1770, for reference) and some were taken over to zoos in America and eventually Smokehill National Park was established for them show more to live in, about ninety years before the story starts, where they then kept very much to themselves. They are an endangered species and many groups want the land for development or mining or want the dragons destroyed or to poach them for the 'medicinal' value of their organs or are worried that dragons might fly out and so there is a protective fence around the park which has the side effect of nullifying a lot of modern technology inside its boundaries. The story is narrated by eighteen year old Jake Mendoza who is writing a book about events that started five years previously (and the epilogue is written five years after that although the narrative style doesn’t change).
Fourteen year old Jake was the son of the Director of the Institute at Smokehill which studied dragons (he's very insistent that Draco australiensis is the only true dragon) and had recently lost his mother. While on his first solo hiking trip in the park, he discovered a mother dragon who had been killed with only one just-born baby dragon surviving. Being used to animals at the small zoo and orphanage at the Institute, Jake rescued the baby and took her home to raise. But, of course, no one knew anything about dragons, much less baby dragons; Lois (as he named her) had imprinted on him and wouldn't let anyone else carry her; and because of the laws surrounding dragons, nobody else could know about her so she had to be raised in secret from the rest of the world; and she could start breathing fire at any moment.
I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she'd fried me in her sleep ... but what if she did?
This is the story of Jake raising Lois; the overwhelming responsibility for a fourteen year old subsumed in rescuing a wild creature that no one knew much about and then the adventure that followed when she grew older and he needed to find dragons to reintroduce her to her species.
The writing style takes a while to get used to; it's very chatty (hah - imagine my seventeen year old son being chatty; but then again, you can't stop my twelve year old son talking) to the extent it's like my sister and I talking to each other, with lots of asides (in fact, we sometimes have to ask the other person to get to the point) and it took the first fifty or so pages (a chapter and a half out of eleven) before anything happened (Jake discovering the mother and baby dragons) and the story finally took off. It took me a bit longer than that to really get used to the chatty style, though (please see preceding sentence).
You don't go near a dying dragon. They can fry you after they're dead. The reflex that makes chickens run around after their heads are cut off makes dragons cough fire. Quite a few people have died this way, including one zoo-keeper. I suppose I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that she was dying, and that her babies were going to die because they had no mother, and that she'd know that. I boomeranged into thinking about my own mother again. They wanted to tell us, when they found her, that she must have died instantly. Seems to me, if she really did fall down that cliff, she'd've had time to think about it that Dad and I were going to be really miserable without her.
How do I know what a mother dragon thinks or doesn't think? But it was just so sad. I couldn't bear it. I went up to her. Went up to her head, which was likely nearly as big as a Ranger's cabin. She watched me coming. She watched me. I had to walk up most of the length of her body, so I had to walk past her babies, these little blobs that were baby dragons. They were born and everything. But they were already dead. So she was dying knowing her babies were already dead. I started to cry and I didn't even know it.
The story is information dense along the way (although it’s possible - and occasionally obvious - that some information is exaggerated by the ‘teenaged’ narrator); though my book came to 338 pages I feel that the print was smaller than usual so it took longer than I had anticipated to finish this book but I did like the story. For [[Lewis Carrol]] fans, there are a few Alice in Wonderland and Jabberwock references scattered about and are the origin of Lois's name.
The premise and the putative science behind it (a lot of which is worked out as the story develops, since this is the first baby dragon to be raised - or even seen - by humans) work. It's similar to learning to raise pandas: I recently caught part of a documentary observing baby pandas in the wild demonstrating behaviours that people hadn't realised are normal - like climbing high into a tree and staying there for a week while mama panda went foraging. They discovered that the black and white colouring is surprisingly effective against the light sky when the baby is sitting high in the branches of a tree bare of leaves. So now they're going to incorporate that into the way they raise captive pandas.
Well worth sticking with this book.
April 2021
4 stars show less
Only a great writer can make a story with such an obviously selfconscious narrator work. The constant interruptions in the storys flow when the narrator interrupts himself or corrects his language are in this book a minor annoyance, as is the sometimes too grammatically challenged sentences.
The narrator of this story about dragons and growing up is Jake Mendoza, a teenager who has lost his mother. He is living in a national park for the elusive dragonus Australicus with his alienated and distracted father. When he is out on his first lone overnight stay in the park he finds a dead dragon mother and her dying newborns next to an equally dead poacher.
He saves the only living dragonlet, which imprint on him as a mother, and survives due show more to his frantic efforts. Efforts which ar hampered by the fact that noone has seen an infant dragonlet before, and the existence of it has to be kept secret, because it is illegal to help a dragon survive.
As the dragonlet grows, it has to stay hidden while the public uproar surrounding the killed poacher is to be be dealt with. When this becomes too great a challenge in the park compound, Jake moves to a distant solitary camp in the park. There the approach of a wild dragon enables the dragonlets reentry in dragon society, bringing Jake - and later the rest of the scientists of the part - with her. show less
The narrator of this story about dragons and growing up is Jake Mendoza, a teenager who has lost his mother. He is living in a national park for the elusive dragonus Australicus with his alienated and distracted father. When he is out on his first lone overnight stay in the park he finds a dead dragon mother and her dying newborns next to an equally dead poacher.
He saves the only living dragonlet, which imprint on him as a mother, and survives due show more to his frantic efforts. Efforts which ar hampered by the fact that noone has seen an infant dragonlet before, and the existence of it has to be kept secret, because it is illegal to help a dragon survive.
As the dragonlet grows, it has to stay hidden while the public uproar surrounding the killed poacher is to be be dealt with. When this becomes too great a challenge in the park compound, Jake moves to a distant solitary camp in the park. There the approach of a wild dragon enables the dragonlets reentry in dragon society, bringing Jake - and later the rest of the scientists of the part - with her. show less
This is not another cutesy story about telepathic dragons. This story is about how anybody ever succeeds in communicating. McKinley is remarkabley convincing in her teenage protagonist and his first person story.
The concentration on the theme of communications is what makes this different and intriguing. The narrator's constant attempts to find ways to tell us, the readers, the story are echoed in his attempts to reach the dragons. It is rare to find such a clear portrayal of the difficulties of presentation and interpretation of information and ideas between truely different parties.
Language shapes how (and what) people can think. Concepts exist in some languages that are unthinkable in others. Languages reflect what is important to show more their native speakers. That is what we refer to in the old example of all of the various words for snow and its different conditions in the Eskimo tongue. Anyone who has attempted to do translations from one language to another is familiar with the problem.
How we might communicate with an alien species must be, at heart, a speculation on what they would find important and worthy of description and of contemplation. I find it quite believable that the dragons of Shadowhill would think so differently from us that interpretation or translation would be virtually impossible. McKinley makes it clear to us how inadequate our language is in this process. She shows us how perhaps the only way such a communications chasm might be overcome is by having infants and children reared 'bilingually'.
McKinley's prose has, in past, been impressive. Clear, evocative, moving, frequently poetic. The fact that this book is written the way it is reflects her expression of the inadequacy of language in the story the narrator has to tell. This point could never have been made so persuaively in easy flowing narration. As readers, we are forced to recognize the difficulty a teenager, a misfit (and what teenager has not felt like one), and a human being has at trying to convey what, in essence, is a first contact with an alien culture.
Every character in the book is shown in terms of their deficiencies in their abilities to communicate. From the Native American who won't speak English to the grief stricken father. Shadowhill can't communicate with the outside world any better than the outside world's media can reach the public.
What better a subject for a young adult novel? show less
The concentration on the theme of communications is what makes this different and intriguing. The narrator's constant attempts to find ways to tell us, the readers, the story are echoed in his attempts to reach the dragons. It is rare to find such a clear portrayal of the difficulties of presentation and interpretation of information and ideas between truely different parties.
Language shapes how (and what) people can think. Concepts exist in some languages that are unthinkable in others. Languages reflect what is important to show more their native speakers. That is what we refer to in the old example of all of the various words for snow and its different conditions in the Eskimo tongue. Anyone who has attempted to do translations from one language to another is familiar with the problem.
How we might communicate with an alien species must be, at heart, a speculation on what they would find important and worthy of description and of contemplation. I find it quite believable that the dragons of Shadowhill would think so differently from us that interpretation or translation would be virtually impossible. McKinley makes it clear to us how inadequate our language is in this process. She shows us how perhaps the only way such a communications chasm might be overcome is by having infants and children reared 'bilingually'.
McKinley's prose has, in past, been impressive. Clear, evocative, moving, frequently poetic. The fact that this book is written the way it is reflects her expression of the inadequacy of language in the story the narrator has to tell. This point could never have been made so persuaively in easy flowing narration. As readers, we are forced to recognize the difficulty a teenager, a misfit (and what teenager has not felt like one), and a human being has at trying to convey what, in essence, is a first contact with an alien culture.
Every character in the book is shown in terms of their deficiencies in their abilities to communicate. From the Native American who won't speak English to the grief stricken father. Shadowhill can't communicate with the outside world any better than the outside world's media can reach the public.
What better a subject for a young adult novel? show less
Lots of echoes of Diana Wynne Jones' 'Dragon Reserve, Home Eight' - or at least, what I remember of it. Now I need to go look that one up and see if they really relate at all. Dragonhaven is a lot richer and more filled-in, anyway - McKinley took Dragon Reserve and ran with it. Very interesting voice in the story - the fact that he's writing it afterward and reluctantly...I'd like to come back to that world in about 100 years and see what's happened.
Reread - but I didn't remember ever reading it before. It's a great story of culture clash - two human cultures (inside and outside the park) and the dragons. Lots of neat questions raised, very few answers - I'd (still) love to read a story set about a hundred years later. It is a somewhat show more odd voice - not only that he's writing it well after the fact, but that during the events he was pretty well out of it one way or another the whole time. Scientist parents do help with instinctive note-taking, though. Lots of very interesting people, human and otherwise. Darn, I thought I'd found a new McKinley...ah well, it was almost as good as new. show less
Reread - but I didn't remember ever reading it before. It's a great story of culture clash - two human cultures (inside and outside the park) and the dragons. Lots of neat questions raised, very few answers - I'd (still) love to read a story set about a hundred years later. It is a somewhat show more odd voice - not only that he's writing it well after the fact, but that during the events he was pretty well out of it one way or another the whole time. Scientist parents do help with instinctive note-taking, though. Lots of very interesting people, human and otherwise. Darn, I thought I'd found a new McKinley...ah well, it was almost as good as new. show less
I like the ideas in this book: the concept of dragons, the way humans might respond to them if they existed as animals in our own world. And I can admire McKinley's ability to create a convincing written-by-a-teenage-boy record of that teenage boy's experiences. But what makes the voice convincing is also what makes the book so difficult to read. The teenage boy's story meanders and curls around favorite topics, hitches and snarls in half-thought reactions to events, and in attempting to express the how-do-I-write-this-amazing-thing, takes too bloody long to get to the interesting bits. Though Dragonhaven is written by one of my favorite storytellers, it reads uncomfortably like the teenage-written memoir it's pretending to be. If I'd show more listened to an audiobook version, I think the narrative flow would've been clearer and easier to follow, but with all the tangents---and a frustrating lack of punctuation---I had to struggle sometimes just to understand what was going on. show less
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Some Editions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2007
- People/Characters
- Jake Mendoza; Lois the dragon; Martha
- Important places
- Smokehill National Park
- Dedication
- To Holly, Hazel, and Rowan
- First words
- I keep having these conversations with Dad. I'm at my computer. He says, "What are you doing?" I mutter something, because the screen has a lot of squiggles on it, so he already knows what I'm doing.
- Quotations
- The usual sorts of field surveys just don't work with dragons. Uh-huh, you say, thirty to eighty feet long (plus tail), flies, breathes fire, and you can't find them to count? Yup. That's right. You can't. After Old ... (show all)Pete opened the cages, they didn't just wander off, they disappeared. That's one of the reasons that a few people - Old Pete included - started wondering if dragons were, you know, intelligent.
Well, the mainstream scientists weren't having any of that, of course, humans are humans and animals are animals and anyone who says it's not that simple is a sentimental fool and a Bad Scientist. There is nothing you can say to a scientist that's worse than accusing them of being a Bad Scientist. They'd rather be arrested for bank robbery than for sentimentality. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Us humans have sure messed up a lot of stuff but we haven't quite finished the job so maybe we can still unmess it a little. Maybe with some help from dragons. And Eleanor as president. Maybe in time for our babies to grow up into a slightly less comprehensively messed-up world. And, forgive my Latin, I can't help myself, but I hope I've got the subjunctive right:
Madeline Sophia Mendoza
born 11 April, 4:25 A.M.
at Dragon Central
seven pounds six ounces
Donato Francis Mendoza
born 6 May, 5:10 P.M.
at Dragon Central
eight pounds nine ounces
Arcadiae vias peregrinentur - Original language
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