Joseph Bruchac, Dragon Castle (New York: Dial, 2011).
Like The Ugly and Out of This Furnace, Dragon Castle counts as a Slovak novel in English only by a certain sleight of hand on my part. It’s not a translation of a book originally written in Slovak, but it’s the only case I’ve ever found of an English-language fantasy novel explicitly drawing on elements of Slovak folklore and language. Reason enough to honor it here!
That it came from Joseph Bruchac is all the more surprising. This well-known YA author has made his name with a grand catalogue of titles drawing on his Native American heritage, specifically from the Abenaki people. His novel Code Talker tells about the Navajos whose evidently impenetrable language played a major role in World War II espionage. He’s recounted the stories of Squanto, Sacajawea, and Pocahantas as well as animal and mythological folktales, not to mention contemporary stories about young people from Native backgrounds and even a dystopian novel.
It turns out, though, that Bruchac has a Slovak ethnic lineage in addition to his Abenaki one. Dragon Castle was not his first effort to make use of this (admittedly less marketable) heritage. In fact, I first became aware of him at all through a “breakfast serial” that my mother-in-law found in their local paper in Yakima, Washington, some time around 2004 or 2005. “Janko and the Giant: A Tale of Old Slovakia” is a classic fairy tale, whose place and characters names are simply what the corresponding word is in Slovak—a village called Dedina, a giant called Velky (“big”), a horse called Kon. It was totally adorable, and needless to say I was pretty thrilled that someone, anyone, was giving attention to habitually overlooked Slovakia.
Digging up that story again is what led me to Dragon Castle. I wondered if it would be an expanded version of “Janko and the Giant” but it is, in fact, its own story—actually, two. One is an ancestral legend about Pavol, whose castle and family were destroyed by an evil lord, but with the help of mentors and benefactors he won the victory and raised up Dragon Castle, with (spoiler alert, though honestly not that much of a spoiler, because you’d figure it out quickly enough anyway) a dragon in the dungeons atop a pile of gold—though with an interestingly alternative set of conditions on human access to the gold.
This legend is gradually unfolded with interspersing chapters about Rashko, one of two princes heir to Dragon Castle. The setting is more or less late medieval (there are references to actual places like Austria and Hungary) but the protagonist speaks in a direct and intimate way to the reader, more like a contemporary narrator. In particular, he devotes a lot of time to expostulating about his kind-hearted but empty-headed parents, which teenagers probably did as much in 1619 (for example) as in 2019. His brother Paulek barely fares any better. Rashko is the clever one who sees behind appearances, makes plans, and takes action—especially when the aforementioned bumbling parents wander off into Faerieland for a spell right when their ancestors’ nemesis returns from his nebulous limbo to try to seize Dragon Castle once more, whom the idiot older brother welcomes in with open arms.
From there it’s a pretty straightforward hero story, replete with wise elders, talking animals, magical objects, tests of fortitude and skill, traitors, exile, return, surprises, revelations, and, of course, a couple of princesses. Plus a final reassessment of the supposed flaws of parents and brother. The unique flavor of the story lies first in the plethora of proverbs to guide and explain the action—proverbs are definitely a big thing in Slovakia—and in the liberal use of Slovak words.
As to the latter, the book helpfully contains a glossary at the back as well as essentially translating each term or phrase as it’s used. On the other hand, the typography was not consistent either with Slovak or the most obvious English transliteration. This would not be a problem for anyone who doesn’t actually know Slovak, but since I do, it often distracted and confused me.
I also wondered why the folks at Dial Books for Young Readers couldn’t pay enough attention to Bruchac’s unswerving use of the term “Slovak” throughout the book long enough to get it right on the book jacket, which uses (shudder) “Slovakian.” It is my dying wish to erase “Slovakian” from the vocabulary of English.