Category Archives: review

A year ago, I reviewed a YA contemporary fantasy novel that drew an intriguing picture of an alternate world where dragons and dragon slayers integrated seamlessly with a world of cars and cornfields. The Song of Owen has spun out into a wonderful and worthy sequel, Prairie Fire. E.K. Johnston gives us a new verse for Owen, featuring his bard, Siobhan McQuaid and their many companions on the oft-mentioned Oil Watch (an international protective duty linking dragon slayers, engineers, medics, firefighters and, after many years without, bards).

A number of other reviewers were taken by Johnston’s deft and engaging alternate history as I was on the first outing. This only deepens in Prairie Fire where Johnston takes us deep into the Oil Watch and deeper into the world those brave souls protect. She delights in off-hand mentions of historical figures from our world who figure a bit differently in her own. In Prairie Fire, this is particularly evident with the focus on Sir John A. MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada and, in both the real world as well as Owen’s universe, the driving force behind a transcontinental railroad. The project was a tough enough endeavour in real history; just imagine what it would have been like in a world where dragons were drawn by fire and exhaust to feast and destroy. So there, the railway went deep underground for far more of the route. In both cases, that labour was mostly through the work of Chinese labourers, whose sacrifices earned them a share of the tunnel’s name as spoken of by McQuaid and others stationed at the desolate concrete outpost of Fort Calgary: the John A-Zuò Tunnel.

Deep tunnels and dedicated dragon slayers don’t mean ease and safety. Johnston gives us risks and dangers galore as we take up after the harrowing end of The Song of Owen with the high school students preparing to wrap up their studies and head off to their duties. Only nobody exactly knows what Siobhan’s duties are, including Siobhan, in a world that’s forgotten the bardic tradition. Where corporate contracts have outweighed community good and dragon slayers are seen as distant figures: those are battles that Owen and Siobhan have already fought and began to make inroads upon with the help of their fellow crusaders, Sadie and Emily. Now the foursome are torn apart, the first three sent off to training in the Oil Watch and Emily remaining behind as their anchor to the rest of the world transfixed by the heroes of Manitoulin.

Siobhan struggles, saddled with devastating injuries incurred during that epic battle in the first book. But she struggles with the help of her friends, old and new, who bond with her in determination to make a difference in the Watch. Around Owen, the support crew builds with Siobhan’s centring support: engineers like Courtney Speed, medics and firefighters, who are there to assist Owen in his terrifying duty. During training, they bond and shine, but then they are faced with even more hurdles, including an unexpected posting where they connect with another renegade dragon slayer, Declan Porter.

And now, in a fashion I hope that Siobhan will approve, we pause for a musical interlude. Siobhan characterizes almost every person she meets musically. Owen’s a horn, Sadie a trumpet. Peter, a farmer that Siobhan befriends, is a mandolin. And Declan Porter, SAS-trained dragon slayer? He’s bagpipes. No bluster, just deeply-based determination leavened with a sense of humour. He’s also a wary mentor for Owen and all the rest: fellows in disgrace, for Declan threw his career away when rather than hide from the most awe-inspiring of dragons, a rogue Chinook boiling out of the Rockies and down to Kansas, he shot it down. Porter saved thousands but his kill started a fire that still burns, years later. (Johnston’s dragons are a serious ecological threat when killed out of turn.) So for Declan Porter, I offer up the feeble hope of rest and relaxation, with Spirit of the West‘s “Home for a Rest”

For Siobhan, Owen and all the rest, there are more adventures in this book. There are adventures and dangerous that will astonish and test, both characters and readers. Serving in the Oil Watch, Owen’s team uneasily realizes that there is real inequity and wilful blindness in their world. They see that people are not the prime value of politicians: but coal, land and wheat. There are trenchant observations as condensed in this exchange between Sadie and Siobhan:

“What are you singing about?” she asked. “The price of wheat?”
“Not in terms of money,” I said.

Siobhan, Owen, Sadie and the rest are also refreshingly real. They stumble and flail, they misread people and yet they soldier on because they are soldiers, now. We follow them into the concrete jungles, off to the coast and into many more encounters with dragons along the way. Primed by the rash and principled bravery of Declan Porter, however, you never know what they might do when a hot wind blows off the mountains.

So I’ll end this review with one more musical interlude, including another bit of Canadiana, for Prairie Fire is that, too, although it wears the Maple Leaf lightly. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young mixed memories, hope and benediction in “Long May You Run”. That is my hope for Owen’s crew and for Johnston, with many more books before her.

The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E.K. Johnston might not be the title of a book that you’d expect to find reviewed on a historian’s blog. But that’s where you’d be wrong because this fabulous new YA fantasy has wide appeal in no small part because it’s a wonderfully clever bit of alternate history served up in a story you won’t want to put down.

As exciting and engrossing as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter debut which married wizardry with an orphan’s coming of age, The Story of Owen uses dragons to drive a story of friendship and growth wrapping around Owen Thorskard, grade eleven transfer student and dragon slayer in training, and Siobhan McQuaid, an aspiring music major who may have just found a practical application for her talents as bard to the budding hero.

Johnston is a wizard of world-building, taking one new and compelling twist to turn our modern world into a dangerous prospect for young Owen and Siobhan. Industrialization didn’t just roll out factories and Fords, in Owen’s fantasy world, it also fuelled a boom in a scary ecological niche – dragons. Thus dragon slayers have become the vital force in protecting urban industrial centres as well as oil-rich regions and shipping routes. But why, then, oh, why, is this young dragon slayer coming of age in the rural world of Trondheim, Ontario?

That’s one of the many mysteries that unfold over the course of the book, explored through the perspective of small town student and would-be composer, Siobhan. She befriends Owen on his first day at school but, despite her best attempts to let the cool crowd take her place, finds Owen a fast friend. He, in turn, sees something in her smart assessments in their history class that links the two in an attempt to revive the ancient alliance of dragon slayer and bard.

All of this isn’t just for show. Just as in any other great story, there’s a threat looming ever closer. The rural world of Trondheim is under siege from the same forces that depopulated Detroit and most of Michigan: dragons. Owen’s family may have produced many great dragon slayers but is a high school junior really ready to take on not just one, but a host? Owen may just have to, with Siobhan by his side, molding his story and sniffing out the roots of this growing crisis.

“Listen! For I sing of Owen Thorskard: valiant of heart, hopeless at algebra, last in a long line of legendary dragon slayers. Though he had few years and was not built for football, he stood between the town of Trondheim and creatures that threatened its survival.

There have always been dragons. As far back as history is told, men and women have fought them, loyally defending their villages. Dragon slaying was a proud tradition.

But dragons and humans have one thing in common: an insatiable appetite for fossil fuels. From the moment Henry Ford hired his first dragon slayer, no small town was safe. Dragon slayers flocked to cities, leaving more remote areas unprotected.

Such was Trondheim’s fate until Owen Thorskard arrived. At sixteen, with dragons advancing and his grades plummeting, Owen faced impossible odds—armed only with a sword, his legacy, and the classmate who agreed to be his bard.

Listen! I am Siobhan McQuaid. I alone know the story of Owen, the story that changes everything. Listen!”

Along the way to the spine-tingling conclusion, you keep bumping into perfect little vignettes of alternate history. Eloise (of Eloise and Abelard fame)? A dragon slayer. Yes, she was just that bad-ass of a medieval woman! Buddy Holly? Not just any musician, but the last great bard who chronicled the deeds of a dragon slayer. The day the music died wasn’t just a tragedy for fans, but it also cut off a major connection between the dragon slayers and the people they protected.

Queen Victoria? She was not just an imperial figurehead (as if!), but a determined protector of the British people and their lands who masterminded the impossible task: shifting a hatching grounds of the flying predators safely away from her favourite British haunts. Canadians will also enjoy a little thrill as, with the story set in modern-day Canada, the True North features naturally, from the steel mills of Hamilton to the outsized legacy of Lester B. Pearson. Lightly handled, all of this background never overwhelms but wonderfully sets the stage for Siobhan, Owen and other determined souls to save Trondheim and nearby Saltrock from the deadly menace of dragons that grows worse every day.

The Story of Owen delivers on every level for readers of all ages. I can’t wait for the release date so I can start making good on the promised gifts of copies to fellow book-lovers. If you’re a YA fan, you have to put Johnston’s book on your must-read list and if you’re not a genre fancier, you should still give it a whirl. A second book in the story world, Prairie Fire is due out in March of 2015. I know that I can’t wait!

I got this book through recent sale held by the University of Chicago Press. While not a work of academic history (my usual term-time fare), I thought it relevant because of my graduate methods course teaching in which I’ve incorporated a history of media segment.

An accomplished interdisciplinary scholar (holding appointments at two universities in sociology, comparative literature, English and human geography), Wendy Griswold takes a synthetic, transnational approach to modern reading cultures. Refreshingly, this isn’t a work solely about the United States, although regionalism and reading cultures in the USA figures into her broader argument linking the local form of a reading class to the sense of regional identity. In Italy, Norway and the United States, Griswold tracks very different experiences of each of these elements: from Italy’s less-robust reading class coexisting with a celebrated and cosmopolitan literary culture to Norway’s effective use of state resources for promoting regional literature nationally to the way in which reader movements across

Griswold employs some fascinating models and arguments. I fell a little bit in love with her term for readers who’ve moved into new regions: cowbirds (due to that species’ ease in taking over the nests of other birds and settling right in). I also appreciated her approach to defining the reading class in which she’s clearly talking about not just literate people but those who both value the practice and dedicate time to it in their busy lives. Griswold challenges the accepted orthodoxy that more time on the internet means less time for reading, drawing on a range of research.

Griswold finishes her chapter on “The Reading Class” with three key points that form her prediction for the future of the reading class. First, that reading enjoys a long-standing prestige in almost every country. Second, that reading is intensely dependent upon social organization beginning with education and culminating in reader-driven interaction (in reading groups, which she studies closely as well as currently popular sites I’d throw into the mix such as Goodreads. Third, and for Griswold, one of the most interesting prospects, is a growing gap she documents between reading for practice and reading “as an esteemed, cultivated, supported practice of an educated elite.” [68]

Here’s where we differ. For this last part, Griswold limits herself dramatically. Those works that she deems particular to the reading practices of the reading class are literature, serious nonfiction, books “of the quality press”. And while those books are certainly important, is this enough to define the reading class? Elsewhere in the book she shows how genre fiction (mysteries, westerns, etc.) also are important works in regional reading classes – evoking a sense of place, community and shared experience that helps to build a strong regional culture. Yet, in this prediction we see those other literary genres excluded and this is a problem. As long as only ‘serious nonfiction, books of the quality press’ are going to define the reading class, much of the experience of devoted and socially-engaged readers will pass by researchers, even those as able as Griswold.
See also this lucid review by Tara Brabazon.