Dragon Rider
by Cornelia Funke
translated by Anthea Bell
2000, The Chicken House / Scholastic, 523p

As amazing as it may seem, Anne McCaffrey never wrote a book called Dragon Rider, even though she wrote Everything Dragon Everywhere All at Once. This book is by Cornelia Funke, a well-known German author of children's fiction - most or all of that output being fantasy, as this one is.

Our main characters are Firedrake (a dragon), Sorrel (a brownie), Ben (an orphaned boy), and Twigleg (a homunculus). The initial story driver is the evil humans, who are moving into the valley that Firedrake and his dragon friends live in. The dragons are further threatened by our antagonist, Nettlebrand - an evil dragon-like creature that likes to eat dragons. Our protagonists meet sentient rats, fairies, dwarves, sea serpents, a basilisk ... And it felt a little like the whole thing could have been put together by a ten year old. I guess every author thinks "what can I do now to move the plot forward?" I had assumed that an author as well regarded as Funke would be more ... creative. The prose is pedestrian too, but it's filtered through translation from the German so it's hard to know where to lay the blame for that.

The book is also thick at over 500 pages. It's sweet, and I don't mind having read it, but I have trouble associating this with the creative mind behind Inkheart which was far more interesting.