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Secret of the Dragon’s Eye
First book in a new fantasy series

by Derek Hart



      Twelve-year-old Gavin Kane lives in Crackington Haven, a small seaside town in North Cornwall. He makes the most of the last gasp of childhood by playing let’s pretend games with his best friend Emily Scott, but now the war has come to change everything. Before his father is called up he shares a book with him, a wonderful book all about King Arthur and a dragon called Thaddeus Osbert. But dragons are made up, aren’t they? Surely there isn’t really one living in Tintagel?

Reading this is a great way to learn a lot about what it was like to live during World War II. It’s all here in some considerable detail, including evacuee boy Bunty who witnesses the bombing of Plymouth, air raid shelters, gas masks, rationing, the Home Guard and more. It almost seems a shame to interrupt it with the fantasy, as there is so much here that is so much larger than life, and distant to how we live now. Letting the dragon appear sooner would have been a good plan, as when he does appear it causes a rift between the real world of bombings, people dying and feats of domestic heroism and the other one of talking dragons and magic swords. It certainly puts a new spin on war fiction, and if this is your sort of thing then you will be pleased that it is only book one in a series. This is an extremely difficult sort of novel to pull off, balancing the two extremes of wartime realism with rather cute fantasy but it works better than many other efforts.

The Book

iUniverse
April 2007
Paperback
059542967X
Juvenile Fantasy - 1940, Cornwall, UK
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Excerpt
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The Reviewer

Rachel A Hyde
Reviewed 2007
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