A Dragon Used to Live Here

March 15, 2022
Grades 3-5 Emily and Thomas, two children of nobility, live in a castle with their parents, a knight and his lady, who are about to celebrate their anniversary with a grand party. Bribing Meg, the head scribe, with scones, the children help her coworkers write out invitations and place cards while they listen to Meg tell stories from her youth, before her falling out with her best friend (now the children's mother). One mesmerizing, episodic tale involves a fearsome dragon that took over the castle and held their mother hostage. Inspired, Emily pressures Thomas to help with a dubious plot to reunite Meg with their mother, a venture that involves forbidden swimming in the moat. Telling stories within a story, Cate's narrative merges traditional fantasy elements with a more modern, conversational tone. While her low-key approach may seem quiet to kids accustomed to rapid-fire action plots, many readers will enjoy the understated wit and relatively leisurely pace of the writing. Spirited drawings bring the settings and engaging characters to life in this very readable chapter book.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
The winding tale skeptical Thomas and his pesky but acute little sister, Emily, tease out of crusty Meg McThorn, supervisor of the castle scriptorium, includes a fire-breathing dragon, knights, wee folk, and the possibility of hidden treasure--and so seems hard to believe. However, as Meg tartly asserts, it's not a "Once upon a time" thing but "a completely true story, with real people I actually know." But was the siblings' mother really once the dragon's captive--until she helped their father "rescue" her? Are there crocodiles in the moat? And gryphons and tricksy pixies in the nearby woods? Tucking scores of cozy, crosshatched sketches into her short chapters as well as sly literary winks in the form of ironic banter and sibling squabbles (Emily, despite being only 9, nearly always comes out on top), Cate nets readers in a web of story as deftly as Meg nets her own audience of two. As past becomes prologue to what happens after the children have adventures of their own, and their noble parents finally come back from, as Thomas puts it, "a stuffy conference about moldy old books and scrolls and manuscripts written in languages no one speaks anymore," Meg's yarn turns out to be verifiably true...or mostly. The female contingent leads the all-White cast, but the boys and men put on decent enough showings, and despite occasional fraught turns, no one, draconic or otherwise, ends up slain. Clever, multistranded, and off the charts in read-aloud potential. (Fantasy. 8-11)

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.