How to Train Your Dragon School: Doom of the Darkwing by Cressida Cowell

Title: How to Train Your Dragon School: Doom of the Darkwing

Author: Cressida Cowell

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Hodder Children’s Books

Published: 13^th May 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 208

Price: $16.99

Synopsis: The start of a brand-new HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON spin-off series, starring Hiccup and his fellow Warriors-in-Training in accessible, hilarious standalone adventures.

Welcome to HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON SCHOOL. Where Viking and Dragon Heroes are made!

Join Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third and his dragons, Toothless and Windwalker, in their hilarious, hair-raising adventures at the Isle of Berk’s Training School for Vikings and Dragons. Where they are BOTTOM in pretty much everything.

Disastrous Lesson Number One: The Art of Battle.

It was supposed to be a quiet, SENSIBLE lesson. Hiccup never MEANT to get into TROUBLE.

But things take an unexpected turn along the way and Hiccup and his friends soon find themselves adrift on stormy seas, in a sinking ship, facing imminent DOOM, in one of their BIGGEST adventures ever…

Packed with illustrations, action and even a Dragonese dictionary, this series is perfect for developing readers, and the millions of HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON fans worldwide.

~*~

How to Train Your Dragon School is a spin-off series from Cressida Cowell’s popular How to Train Your Dragon series. In this new series, Hiccup and his friends are off to dragon school with their dragons. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third is a Viking, and there are very high expectations from everyone and how he is able to train Toothless and Windwalker, and that he should be the best at school. But on the first day of Dragon School on the Isle of Berk, lots of other students haven’t shown up yet, and as they begin to embark on lesson one, Hiccup and Fishlegs are sent off on a dangerous adventure to face an even more dangerous dragon as the fate of a sinking ship from a nearby island is in danger. Hiccup and Fishlegs want to prove that they’re not hopeless like everyone thinks they are, so they head off to face the impending doom…and discover something fearful.

This is one of Hiccup’s biggest adventures – where he sets off to save the day after a particularly nasty and yucky start to April Fule’s Day in his world, which is populated by Vikings, dragons and Thor. This humorous fantasy story takes place in a world where that has enchanted many readers for years. This new adventure and series expands on the world of Hiccup and his dragons. Dragons are a popular creature in fiction, and they are used in many different ways to explore different themes and stories. It has darkness and light, much like the Wizards of Once series, and builds on the world of How to Train Your Dragon.

As Hiccup speaks Dragonese to his dragons throughout the book, there is a really cool glossary or dictionary of dragonese at the back of the book to help younger readers see how the language works and learn to speak it themselves. It’s the kind of book that younger readers would love – easy to read, a fun story and lots of jokes that will appeal to all senses of humour. It’s a fun book, and even though I have never read or seen How to Train Your Dragon, and I was able to read this and work out who everyone was and where they fit in. I felt writing the start to the spinoff series in this way worked, as it still means if someone picks up this book first, they can understand it and then go back to the original series.

Fantasy books are a fantastic way to explore human nature, what we expect from people and how they react, because bringing human reactions and nature into a world of magic shows how people might react in the real world. How an older, historical society might have seen people who didn’t fit their ‘norm’. Or how we treat people in general, and view certain things as failures. All this, being brave, and the lengths that some people will go to so they can prove themselves is all encapsulated in this new book from Cressida Cowell. I think  this is going to be an exciting new series for those who have enjoyed her previous books.