After a long time, I revisited George R.R. Martin’s writing. I was listening to this fantastic book podcast about A Game of Thrones, and the nostalgia just hit me hard. Take me back to 2013, please, when I read this series back-to-back and nerded out so hard about it, without yet the severe disappointment that the series would likely never get completed.
Thirteen years later, and with no new book in the series in sight, I have given up and am reading some of his other books. There’s just something dramatic and exciting about his writing style that appeals to me. I know he’s not perfect, and he goes off on tangents and has a hard time with plotting, but I just like his books. Or maybe it’s the Chinese Fire Dragon side of me that’s reacting to all the dragons in the series, who knows 🔥🐲.
Anyway, I saw The Ice Dragon in the library, it was short, and had beautiful illustrations, and I got sucked into his world-building straight away.
About The Ice Dragon
The ice dragon was a creature of legend and fear, for no man had ever tamed one. When it flew overhead, it left in its wake a desolate, cold, and frozen land. But Adara was not afraid. For Adara was a winter child, born during the worst freeze that anyone, even the Old Ones, could remember.
Adara could not remember the first time she had seen the ice dragon. It seemed that it had always been in her life, glimpsed from afar as she played in the frigid snow long after the other children had fled the cold. In her fourth year, she touched it, and in her fifth year, she rode upon its broad, chilled back for the first time.
Then, in her seventh year, on a calm summer day, fiery dragons from the North swooped down upon the peaceful farm that was Adara’s home. And only a winter child – and the ice dragon who loved her – could save her world from utter destruction.
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
This is a children’s story, so I went in expecting a simple, straightforward story meant for a child. But there are a lot of deeper allusions that an adult can get, especially coming from the TV show or the Game of Thrones books.
Interestingly, the book does not explicitly spell out the setting of this strange, magical land as Westeros; it could be any land, but there are dragons – both fire and ice. There is a war, and again, it’s the small folk who are affected. There are many references to the others (the strange zombies from beyond the wall). If you read into it more deeply, it could possibly be a kind of origin story? Is young Adara some version of an Other, for a while?
They said it was the chill of that terrible freeze that had killed her mother, stealing in during her long night of labor past the great fire that Adara’s father had built, and creeping under the layers of blankets that covered the birthing bed. And they said that the cold had entered Adara in the womb, that her skin had been pale blue and icy to the touch when she came forth, and that she had never warmed in all the years since. The winter had touched her, left its mark upon her, and made her its own.
This passage definitely makes her sound like an Other. She seems cold and detached from her family; it’s only the Ice Dragon and, to a lesser extent, the ice lizards that she loves.
The excess of ice that surrounds Adara for most of the story is probably a metaphor for her cold relationship with her family. This relationship is mended when she and the ice dragon fight the fire dragons and rescue her father and siblings, but the ice dragon dies, and with it, the winter within Adara herself. In a sense, this is also the end of her childhood years.
I think when she returns and realizes she can’t touch the ice lizards anymore, it signals that she has grown up. What that might mean is that GRRM associates fire with change and the cycle of life and death, while ice, as Aemon from A Song of Ice and Fire would say, preserves.
The battles between the fire and the ice dragons are interesting, and again, the references to ice and fire make me wonder about the hidden depths within this rather simple story.
Would this book appeal to a child? Maybe? The writing is simple, but it also has layers that I think a child might just skim through, which would be a shame because on the surface, the story is very basic. It’s the world-building and the ice dragon’s background that make this book very special. I enjoyed it, but it’s not for the casual reader.
