Temple Cloud

Once Kurmo lands in a concealed spot in the woods, our heroes finally get their camping holiday – if not quite the one they had intended.   Kurmo even manages to find a cave for them to sleep in, just as they had discussed back in Chapter 28 ! As the humans clamber stiffly out of Kurmo’s luggage compartment, they tell themselves that no-one has followed them and that at last they are finally free, and their only worry is whether Kurmo’s scales will grow back or whether he will be stuck with skin like an elephant’s for the rest of his life. We have already seen Kurmo’s experiences of going into another life after crashing to the floor of Black West’s premises.   Now, the humans describe their experiences, each of which had been different.   Johann comments that he had thought that they were dead, but then he felt very hot, which didn’t seem to fit with being dead and he had heard a kind of singing, like his parents singing to celebrate his birthday.   (I would a...

Meanwhile, Johann has come back from searching for water to find that Janka and Kurmo have disappeared.  He wonders what to do, and whether he should phone the mountain rescue service, just as, when Frau Tossilowas first kidnapped , his first thought was to ring the police. This book plays with what has been derided in How Not to Write a Novel and on TV Tropes as the Cellphones Are Useless  problem: the question of how, in a modern age when nearly everyone has a mobile phone, any character who gets into danger would not simply take out their mobile phone and call the emergency services.   Personally, I think it is unrealistic to assume that everyone does have reliable mobile phone access.   Even now, living in a rural area of a developed, densely populated country, I have patchy mobile reception at best, and we don’t know whether it would work in whatever secluded area Black West have their headquarters.   But it might – if Johann decides to call the mount...

Hi, I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated, but thank you to everyone who is donating to help refugees – whether through my JustGiving   pages , or directly to charities.  I’ve just had an email from the UN Refugee Agency about the situation in Ukraine  and what they’re doing to help, so please have a look at it. In the meantime, I’m still getting on with my reading challenge.   I’ve started reading the next book on my list, but I’m trying to get up to date with blogging about Drachenerwachen .   So… Still at Black West, we jump to a scene with the villains, the thin-lipped man with ash-blond hair and the dainty man called Sherpa Sarvas, who are worrying about why the effect of Kurmo’s imprinting hasn’t yet summoned him to Frau Tossilo.   Sarvas offers his companion a raspberry-flavoured sweet, explaining that the taste of raspberries comforts him because it brings back memories of childhood – so yes, we were right, the sweet-wrapper was a sign of...

When they are sure that everyone is asleep, Kurmo and the children set off.   Janka has found a web of material that she bought years ago at a circus flea-market (not to be confused with a flea-circus market) to wrap around Kurmo’s neck and forequarters so that she can hold onto the loops.   Johann decides to ride in Kurmo’s luggage compartment instead, as it’s quite bad enough knowing what a long drop there is from a flying dragon, without having to see it with your own eyes.   Longing for adventures was all very well in the days when they only happened on computer screens, before he met Kurmo and his life changed forever. As they set off, Kurmo warns them that it is a long journey and that the children had better get some sleep.   Johann agrees, and asks, ‘ Kannst du vielleicht das Dach mal draufmachen?   Der, äh, Mond blendet. ’ This stopped me for a moment, because I knew that aufmachen meant ‘open’, so was Johann asking Kurmo to open the ‘roof’ of ski...

Finally, the holiday weekend arrives.   Frau Tossilo has been made redundant from her job at the nearby shoe-shop, and, although she has been offered jobs in other branches, she decides that it’s not worth the long commute and that she will wait a while before looking for another job.   After all, her mother has left her a surprisingly large amount of money, so she isn’t in immediate financial need. Hmm - in my experience of trying and failing to find a job, it’s difficult to persuade employers that you are worth hiring if you aren’t currently in work, preferably paid work (though voluntary work in a charity shop is better than nothing).   After all, Frau Tossilo can hardly put ‘spending quality time with my dragon’ on her CV as a valid reason to take a break, the way that a teacher or crèche worker can list taking time out to bring up their own children as relevant work experience.   But I suspect that Frau Tossilo’s life may be taking off in dramatically differen...

Of course, the death of her mother forces Ilona Tossilo out of the way for a few days, as she has to go to her late mother’s home area to put her affairs in order, organise the funeral, and so on.   In the meantime, Johann and Janka are responsible for looking after Kurmo.   Janka even takes time off from circus skills practice to keep the dragon company while Johann goes out to buy food for him – and after all, she can always practise her agility by climbing on Kurmo! I don’t get the impression that Black West arranged to assassinate Frau Tossilo’s mother, but they are still spying on the block where she lives, and her absence creates an opportunity for them.   Johann, returning with four large boxes of cabbages and waiting for Janka to bring the Pink Prince to lug the vegetables up to Frau Tossilo’s flat on the eighth floor, catches sight of the mysterious ‘Blanket-Peter’, Frau Tossilo’s sinister visitor from the other day, approaching, talking on his phone about plac...

And now, we get a villain chapter!   A thin-lipped man with ash-blond hair is sitting in ‘einen schwarzen Drehledersessel’, literally ‘a black swivel-leather-chair’, which seems a strange way of putting it – I’d have expected it to be referred to as ‘einen schwarzen ledernen Drehsessel’ for ‘a black leather swivel-chair’.   PDB11 suggested that it might mean a chair made of turned leather, whatever that is, but it seems to be a chair that swivels round and that is made of black leather.   It’s just that the ‘made of leather’ part seems to be what the author wants to emphasise. At any rate, the man sitting in the chair, in a tower-block in another country, with floor-length windows looking out onto a frozen lake, is talking on the phone to a man called Sherpa Sarvas, assuring him that their colleague is in Berlin sorting out the matter in hand. I don’t know how I feel about one of the villains apparently being a Tibetan (unless, of course, ‘Sherpa Sarvas’ is just a co...