The Dragon Keeper's Handbook

July 25, 2011
This note-perfect "nonfiction" book on fantasy creatures will be eerily familiar to anyone who's read the genre it emulates, down to catchy, vague chapter titles with explanatory subtitles; humorous, opinionated footnotes ("Flat-earthers do not make the world any less round"); and the occasional flight of impassioned rhetoric. The natural history of dragons is logically constructed and will enchant readers who like their magic to have rules (though if it were a real how-to, would-be dragon keepers would surely be impatient with the abstruse background). The mythic analysis section is deft and fascinating, though the line between metaphor and purported truth often blurs. The final detailed advice on dragon keeping is uniformly charming. Keeping true to form, there is no disguised plot, characterization, or dialogue, so this clever parody may be of interest only to a subset of fantasy fans.