Donn Kushner (1927–2001)

This charming little tale combines two of my favourite things, books and dragons. Nonesuch starts off as a regular dragon, raised by his grandmother who has a hoard of gold, jewels etc, which every dragon needs, as she teaches him. He witnesses the demise of various family members at the hands of humans and also witnesses the savagery of human beings against each other in early mediaeval England. Then his grandmother sort of commits suicide by crawling down to the hot interior of the earth and when he tries to go after her, although he is driven back by the heat, his biochemistry is changed in a unique way. Left alone, he eventually forms attachments to humans and through a monk who makes illuminated manuscripts, to the beautiful book that will become his treasure over succeeding centuries.

This is a story where the characters and their interaction forms the main interest as there is no big action packed plot. It is a gentle story, but there are still villains who do harm and some quite adult notions in the final, 20th century portion, dealing with municipal corruption and unscrupulous property developers. Under it all, however, the modern villain probably has a lot in common with a mediaeval one Nonesuch encountered, a point made clearer by the property developer's choice of reading matter - The Prince by Machiavelli. The final section provides the opportunity for Nonesuch to draw on his heritage, and yet the reader should not expect pyrotechnics.

A nice touch is the inclusion of illustrations including marginalia in the style of an illuminated manuscript.… (mer)

Nonesuch is a dragon, and the protagonist of the story. We meet him as a very young dragon in ancient times. But dragons, it seems, live a very very long time, and the book's chapters aim at a handful of specific points of Nonesuch's life reaching to the present day. The premise, that a dragon's duty is to always guard its treasure, and that this dragon has chosen a book as its treasure, is a delightful concept for a booklover such as myself. But the storytelling is uneven. There are stretches of the book that are warm and delightful, there are stretches with more involved plotting, and there are stretches that grow quite tedious long before they reach an end. It is at heart a children's novel, good, but no classic.… (mer)