Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series, but I have never read it. One of these days, I will get to the bottom of my stack of books and go out to buy some. Consequentially, I can’t compare this book to any on Terry Pratchett’s more popular novels.
Dragons at Crumbling Castle is a collection of short stories written by a seventeen-year-old Terry Pratchett when he worked as a junior reporter at a local British newspaper in the nineteen sixties. This was at a time when people actually still hired teens to do real work, and you didn’t have so many child labor laws to make it impossible for teens to learn a real trade. He did odd stories of random country events, but also wrote weekly stories for children. This book is a collection of those children’s stories.
Even at that young age, Terry Pratchett was a talented writer. This isn’t descriptive prose to win awards. It’s just fun stories that line up one joke right after another.
There are fourteen stories in this book and each one is funny in a slap-stick juvenile way. I loved them all, but I didn’t really laugh at loud at them. My sense of humor tends more toward dry irony, but I can appreciate the humor in this book anyway. I’m actually amazed at the number of clever ideas Terry Pratchett had as a teenager. He has reoccurring stories about the carpet people which inspired his first novel. I really enjoyed the time traveling commuter bus story. Actually, I did laugh out loud for the punchline to that one!
This is a very fun, light book with perfect humor for children third grade and up. I may even up re-reading this book whenever I just need something to cheer me up and a amuse me.
Check out my young adult fantasy fiction novels HERE for something optimistic and fun.
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What do you think?