The Search for the Red Dragon by James A. Owen

This is the second volume of Owen's Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, following Here, There Be Dragons. I found I liked this volume better, maybe because I knew more about the "territory" from the beginning, but I think that the pacing was more even, on the whole. Similarly to Here, There Be Dragons, The Search for the Red Dragon begins with a summons to a quest beset with dangers that require quick-witted responses along with interpretive abilities on the part of the three Caretakers of the marvelous atlas and the lands it maps. They go to the city of Paralon (in each volume the section that moved most slowly for me as a reader--and I got stopped for a bit at that point), and they spend some time with their engaging friend, the charming talking badger Tummeler, consult the mapmaker in the Keep of Time, and escape in a dragonship (converted at the beginning of this volume to an airship) to embark on a perilous quest in which they explore lands known to the rest of us through fiction, epic poetry, and myth, meeting an array of historical and fictional characters, including the aged Peter Pan, and tracing the "origins" of the pied piper/pan/Orpheus's seduction of children.

One of the pleasures of reading this second volume is starting it with knowledge of the identities of the three Caretakers, John, Jack, and Charles--J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. The experienced reader can enjoy tracing Owen's layering and linking of many, many stories, ranging from Greek mythology through the Children's Crusade through Dante's exploration of the inferno through the fate of the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island through Sir James Barrie's writing of Peter Pan through the mysterious disappearances into the Bermuda Triangle. It's probably a mistake to search this volume too closely for logical connections--although as a free-associating trip through legend and mystery, the novel is highly successful. Above all, it is immensely entertaining, made more appealing by Owen's illustrations and chapter titles that keep drawing the reader in.

Owen's Amazon Blog at http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A2M4WN9FNQA837 summarizes the "history" of the Imaginarium Geographica, conceived as an actual rare book that Owen tracked down in Vienna.