The Book of Dragons
Narrated by Elizabeth Grace, Andrew Bond
The Book of Dragons is Edith Nesbit's 1899 collection of eight dragon stories, where the children do the thinking and the grown-ups get in the way.
These stories came a few years before Five Children and It, and the voice is already hers: dry, sideways, fond of the children and a little tired of everyone else. They are fairy tales that know they are fairy tales, and the dragons get tricked and bargained with far more often than they get fought.
The dragons come in every size and temper. A small boy named Lionel is fetched from his nursery to be king, opens a book in the palace, and lets a dragon out of its pages. A princess who keeps a hippopotamus as a pet meets a purple stranger. Effie gets something in her eye that turns out, under her father's microscope, to be a very small dragon, and soon the whole country has a dragon problem. George and Jane do what they were told not to on fireworks night and end up a long way north with an ice dragon. A queen visits a witch for a baby and is warned the child will bring her sorrow. A poor blacksmith finds something living in the dungeon under his ruined castle. Princess Sabrinetta, who does her own housework in her tower, faces a fiery dragon with nothing but a heart of gold. And kind little Edmund, who takes clocks apart to see what makes them go, finds a cockatrice in the caves.
Kenneth Grahame's The Reluctant Dragon and the gentler end of the Grimm shelf are the nearest neighbors. Each story runs long enough for one night and no longer. Read slowly and softly, the dragons burn low fast, and most nights you will not stay awake long enough to learn which one wins.
