How to train your Dragon to fight stupidity

[SqueakyVoice]

http://gu.com/p/4dgmg

Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books ... “stand out not only for their humour, excitement, and startlingly vivid descriptive language, but also, more surprisingly, for their profound meditations on complex political, historical, emotional and moral themes ...
“They incite children to reason and to question, and inspire their imagination and inquisitiveness,” said the magazine. 

Has anyone (or their children) read any of these? Any thoughts?

[Rhiannon]

I haven't read them; the youngest of my kids quite likes them but the older two didn't get into them. For comparison they read Skullduggery Pleasant, LOTR/Hobbit, David Eddings. Universally loathed is Jacqueline Wilson.

[jeremyp]

Universally loathed is Jacqueline Wilson.

I've never read any of her books but I have heard her interviewed on arts and books programmes. I get the impression she writes the kind of books that adults think children should like.

[Hope]

I've never read any of her books but I have heard her interviewed on arts and books programmes. I get the impression she writes the kind of books that adults think children should like.

I've never read any either, but I can remember a school librarian being asked by the pupils why the library only had a couple of her books.  Her response was along the lines that the local authority library department deemed her work to be of poor quality.  It was they who provided the schools in the area with their recommendations each year.

I suspect that this kind of local authority input is less today.

[Rhiannon]

Micgsel Rosen and the Dahl family founded the Roald Dahl Funny Prize for children's' fiction as an antidote to Wilson and others in her genre, on the basis that children like to laugh.