Book Review: The Last Dragon January 13, 2008

The Last Dragon Miramax Books, 2004, 361 pp., $6.99Silvana De Mari ISBN 142310405-6 Have you ever faced the difficulty of being the last person in your species? I know I definitely haven’t! Well, Yorshkrunsquarkljolnerstri, or Yorsh, an elf, had to deal with that very situation when he was only a child. All of the few elves left except for Yorsh were drowned in a time of much rain and darkness in their own houses. His grandmother told him to flee from the flooding, taking only a book of poems his mother wrote, and a map his father drew. He never knew his parents. In the time Yorsh grew up in, elves and humans never mixed. If a human ever came in contact with an elf, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that they must have murdered their mother in a previous life. Who would take care of Yorsh? What human, could possibly be kind enough, to take care of a poor child, an elf, who is a complete know-it-all, cannot cry, will gladly bring your dinner rabbit back to life, whatever feelings he has whoever is around him has them too, can read other people’s feelings, talks to animals, and think they will eat him with rosemary? Who on earth? After meeting a woman and a hunter, and read a prophecy that said the last elf would meet the last dragon, he set out to find a place on his father’s old map marked here be dragons. I loved reading this book; I am definitely going to read it again. At the end it left me crying, but he last sentence created a smile on my face. Something really astonished me wile I was reading this book, Silvana really captured the life of each of her characters. She made me laugh, cry, and think. Are there other people like Yorsh in this world? Are there really smart people, who were abandoned by their parents and the rest of their family are dead? Were there people like the dragon, who risked their life for someone else? And is it really possible, that someone could be so depressed; they lie in bed and wait for death? This book to me was more then a story, it was a life, a life that seemed so real. This book made me think not only how it wasn’t real, but how it could be.