Dragonlore: From the Archives of the Grey School of Wizardry
Ash "LeopardDancer" DeKirk
New Page Books
Nonfiction, Magic/Mythology
Themes: Dragons, Encyclopedias
**+
Description
From the earliest creation myths and art to modern movies and online games, dragons have compelled, terrified, and enthralled us. The author gathers a variety of dragons and dragonlike animals from legend, lore, and real life, along with several of their fictional counterparts.
Review
This lists its origins as "the archives of the Grey School of Wizardry," an online collaboration. Like many online endeavors, the accuracy is hit-and-miss, and the
target audience skews to modern, younger readers who don't care for depth or analytical scrutiny of a given topic. DeKirk confuses Greek and Latin, oversimplifies several
dragon stories while missing the point of others, and bundles real and cryptozoological creatures in with clear products of myth and legend. While the dinosaur-dragon
link is tenuous at best - some fossil finds may have influenced individual tales, but overall the concept of the dragon evolved independently - DeKirk can't wait to devote
page count to her favorite dinosaurs, not to mention prehistoric animals with only vague relations to dragons. I'm sorry, but simply looking cool isn't enough to compare
a dinosaur to a dragon, especially as she seems woefully confused; most classical dragons were quadrupeds, while several of her "dragonlike" dinosaurs were bipedal. Her
section on dragons from modern film, literature, and gaming is haphazard and skewed, in addition to containing several spoilers. Why spend so much time expounding on the
dragonlike critters of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon and not even mention card games like Magic: The Gathering or the popular online game Neopets, which
has several dragon proxies? Why only mention Gamecube and Playstation when many PC and older games also feature dragons as stars or prominent peripheral characters? Why
jump on manga/anime series with only feeble connections to dragons (Fullmetal Alchemist gets a nice chunk of text just because the bad guys have an Ouroborous-like
tattoo) when discussing modern dragon literature and relegate of the true classics (such as Peter Dickinson's hypothetical "real" dragons of The Flight of
Dragons and Jane Yolen's excellently realized dragons of the Pit Dragon trilogy) as "suggested further reading" for dracophiles? One might think that, despite
the length of the bibliography, DeKirk was only interested in those dragons which she personally liked, and couldn't care less about providing a truly varied and unbiased
sampling of modern dragons. But, I suppose she had a reason for this bias. This reason was in no way obvious to me, the humble dracophile reader, but I suppose there was one
all the same.
An original story, which is really just a teaser for a longer fiction book about priests who serve elemental master dragons, bored me out of wading deeper in under two pages
(not helped, certainly, by excessive background info - the dreaded "infodump" - and the overuse of similar-sounding names chock full of apostrophes - marks of an amateur
writer if ever there were ones), despite her ever-so-subtle integration of the story's dragon lore into previous chapters as if it were long-established "fact." I also
found several misspellings and blatant editing errors, which just made the book feel rushed and amateur. However, DeKirk does gather several dragon legends from around the
world which, while excessively summarized, I hadn't heard before, plus she has a more extensive list of named dragons from world folklore than most dragon books I own.
I bought it at Half Price Books, so for that price I wasn't entirely disappointed. If I'd paid full cover price, though, I expect it might have dropped to two stars; as it
was, it was dangerously close to the line.