Dragons

Thursday

Katherine Dee

The new power of cryptid belief

From our US edition

Last month, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), someone posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image displayed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia. “The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a FAKE snow storm and manipulating the weather so they can freeze it because of the military bases in the area.” The post gained enough traction to land on Know Your Meme, the internet’s best-kept meme encyclopedia. But it wasn’t just a meme, at least in the sense we usually mean. A lot of people earnestly believed that the biblical Leviathan was waking up from beneath the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

A treasure chest of myths: The Poisoned King, by Katherine Rundell, reviewed

You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration, is faintly reminiscent of Pauline Baynes.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

It’ll please small kids, but they’re never to be trusted: Raya and the Last Dragon reviewed

Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine, non-white representation, a narrative that isn’t hung up on romance — but no one involved appears to have asked themselves: do we have an interesting story? Do we have any fresh ideas? Is it fun? This may please very small kiddies who don’t know any better, and there are plenty of them about, but Raya’s not a classic in the making. It’s gorgeously depicted, needless to say, but disappointingly unanimated in all other ways. While this film may please small kiddies, remember: they are not to be trusted.