Book review: The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

The twenty-eighth book I read in 2015 is The Last Dragonslayer, the first book in the Chronicles of Kazam series by Jasper Fforde.  Fforde is best known for Thursday Next, the fictional heroine of an off-kilter, reality-bending series of books about ... well, books, and Book World, and what happens when characters travel back and forth from fiction to reality, or at least the version of reality that's real in his setting, where the Crimean War was still raging in the 1980s.

Thursday Next (and his less famous Nursery Crimes series, which I actually like even better) is a series for adults, however, while the Chronicles of Kazam are pitched as juvenile fiction.  I was leery of how well Fforde's irreverent sense of humor would translate.

Quite well, I'm pleased to report.  The plot centers on Jennifer Strange, a fifteen-year-old foundling left in charge of a down-at-the-heels troupe of magicians who are hired out for jobs like rewiring houses without making any holes in the walls and pizza delivery via flying carpet.  When diviners all over the kingdom start to report predictions that the last living dragon will be slain within a fortnight, she faces the choice either to profit from the inevitable or try to thwart the prophecy and save the dragon.