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Hiccup: Hiccup How to Train Your Dragon

Cressida Cowell
Part of the 'Hiccup' Series

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Synopsis

Hiccup How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell
Read the original books before you see the How to Train Your Dragon film! THE STORY BEGINS in the first volume of Hiccup's How to Train Your Dragon memoirs...Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking Hero who ever lived. But it wasn't always like that. In fact, in the beginning, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was the most put upon Viking you'd ever seen. Not loud enough to make himself heard at dinner with his father, Stoick the Vast; not hard enough to beat his chief rival, Snotlout, at Bashyball, the number one school sport and CERTAINLY not stupid enough to go into a cave full of dragons to find a pet...It's time for Hiccup to learn how to be a Hero. How to Train Your Dragon is soon to be a DreamWorks film starring Gerrard Butler, America Ferrera and Jonah Hill, out in March 2010 adapted from the best selling How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell. Read the rest of Hiccup's exploits in the How to Train Your Dragon series in How to Be a Pirate, How to Speak Dragonese, How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse, How to Twist a Dragon's Tale, A Hero's Guide to Deadly Dragons, How to Ride a Dragon's Storm, and How to Break a Dragon's Heart. Check out the all-new Hiccup website at www.howtotrainyourdragonbooks.com It's the place to go for games, downloads, activities and sneak peeks! Read all about Hiccup and all of your favourite characters, learn to speak Dragonese and train your own dragon to do tricks!

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Reviews

'If you haven't discovered Hiccup yet, you're missing out on one of the greatest inventions of modern children's literature.'
Guardian children
's editor CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE WEEK: 'This book is great fun and has a Blackadderish sense of humour ... full of the sort of jokes that will make schoolboys snigger.'
Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times 20030309 A super story, inventive, ingenious, perpetually surprising. One to cherish
. -- Armadillo, Spring 2003 20030309 A wonderfully wittily written and illustrated story. -- Waterstones Quarterly Magazine 20030401 How to Train Your Dragon is a delightful narrative caper... It offers a challenging read to 11-year-olds, and rewards reading aloud, especially for those who relish an element of theatre at story time. -- Lindsey Fraser, Sunday Herald, Glasgow 20030406 ... raucous and slapstick... liberally illustrated with [Cressida Cowell's] riotous drawings, notes and maps. -- The Financial Times 20030405 [Cressida Cowell] puts a contemporary spin on the old brains over brawn moral and brings the story to a climax with a thrilling dragon duel. Lots for lots of different readers to enjoy. -- Books for Keeps 20030501 Cowell brings Hiccup to life in this silly and delightful little novel. -- St Paul Pioneer Press 20050108 Bulging with good jokes, funny drawings and dramatic scenes, it is absolutely wonderful. -- Independent on Sunday 20030622 The combination of cartoons with sharp wit is what makes this book so uniquely special -- Books Quaterly (Waterstones) 20030622
This is another instalment in the hesitant progress of Cressida Cowell's nervous, gentle Viking, 'Useless
Hiccup. He
's now old enough for the Dragon Initiation Programme: 1. Get your dragon. 2. Train your dragon. 3. Prove you've trained your dragon. Only then can you become a fully fledged Hooligan of Berk, the island where Hiccup lives. Skinny and unremarkable as he is, it seems at first as though Hiccup will fail horribly, particularly when the dragon he manages to capture turns out to be not only tiny but toothless. When his dragon fails to respond to conventional training methods - as described in Professor Yobbish's highly regarded book - Hiccup is forced to develop his own ideas. However, on the Final Test day, everything goes horribly wrong and punishment looms, before a new threat shows the other Vikings how useful Hiccup really is. Funny and touching, this book is really informative about dragons and their habits (one habit gives the words 'singing'
and
'supper'
a whole new meaning)
. Jokes about farting and other gross things, not to mention names like 'Gobber the Belch
and
'Baggybum', will also appeal to the small boy in all of us. Ages 7-9 (Kirkus UK)'

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About The Author

Cressida Cowell grew up in London and on a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. The name of the island is a secret, but it was such a small island it wasn’t really big enough to have a name at all. There were no roads or shops or electricity on the island, just one house and a storm-blown wilderness of sea-birds and heather.

Every year, Cressida’s family spent four weeks of the summer, and two weeks of the spring, on the island. The family had to catch their own fish to eat. The house was lit by candle-light, and there was no telephone or television, so Cressida spent her time drawing and writing stories.

In the evening, Cressida’s father read the children tales of the Vikings, who had invaded this island Archipelago over half a millennium before, of the quarrelsome Tribes who fought and tricked each other, and of legendary dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs. This was how Cressida herself first began to write stories about Vikings and dragons, back when she was eight or nine years old. Many years later, she turned her original childhood ideas into the book How to Train Your Dragon, featuring Hiccup the reluctant Viking, and his equally reluctant dragon, Toothless.

When Cressida wasn’t on the island, she was going to school at Marlborough College in Wiltshire where she met and became close friends with Lauren Child, a fellow author/illustrator and the creator of TV’s Charlie and Lola. Cressida and Lauren remain close friends. Indeed Lauren is godmother to Cressida’s daughter Clemmie.

After school, Cressida obtained a BA in English Literature from Oxford University, a BA in Graphic Design from St Martin’s and an MA in Narrative Illustration from Brighton.
Cressida wrote and illustrated her first picture book, Little Bo Peep’s Library Book, for Hodder Children’s Books in 1998. Her first novel for eight to twelve year olds, How to Train Your Dragon, was published to popular and critical acclaim in 2003: ‘The next big thing in children’s literature,’ wrote The Independent on Sunday. ‘Irresistibly funny, exciting and endearing,’ said The Times.

How to Train Your Dragon has now been published in over thirty languages. Film rights were sold to DreamWorks Animation in 2003 for a substantial sum and the filmed version was released into cinemas in March 2010. The 3D animated film from the studio that created Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda, was directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois (the directors of Lilo and Stich) and produced by Bonnie Arnold (who produced Toy Story).

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