Having just reached the age of fifty recently, I’m getting horribly nostalgic as I feel my age and keep trying to escape back to yesteryear. Well, we’ve been back in the UK for seven years at the time of writing and the children are now adult-sized and grown up, but I’ve never forgotten those wonderful books even though I had forgotten the names and details.

Wrede’s books helped make it rather magical. We spent five years after that living in rural Bangladesh, but never forgot those few weeks dealing with the nightmare that is Dhaka. For three months, both my kids and I loved sitting in that huge bamboo chair reading the ‘Enchanted Forest Chronicles’ in Dhaka, Bangladesh while we did our language training.

They loved it and devoured all the remaining books before their time in that home was over.Īnd so that’s how I came to know and love Wrede’s brilliant and hugely underrated series of books about Princess Cimorene and her dragon, Kazul. The first book he pulled out happened to be about a princess and dragons but it was not at all what they all expected. And so, every night, the man and his two children would sit in a HUGE cauldron of a chair, pull out a book from the nearby shelf, and read stories to help the children to sleep easily in their strange beds. With two small children in tow also having to deal with a world which was bewildering and magical in its own way, the young(ish) man and his wife did their best to make their children’s world as safe as possible. Once upon a time there was a young(ish) man who took his family off to a strange and bizarre land, where they settled – for a few months – in the home of a family who were away visiting strange(r) lands of their own. I will confess a considerable bias in writing this review.

Cimorene dealing with dragons