That's her on the hilltop.
Thus it was that I, Jennifer Strange, sixteen years next month and loyal subject of King Snodd IV in the Kingdom of Hereford, took on the rights and responsibilities of the last Dragonslayer.
Imagine your
standard fantasy setting, some place like
Middle-earth. You have your green, pastoral fields, your villages, your sheep, your kings and knights, and your medley of mythical creatures, including, naturally, dragons. Now, imagine that this place
didn't stay frozen in
medieval stasis, and instead continued to change through the years, and that it now exists at a point in time closer to modern age—the year 2007, to be specific.
The Last Dragonslayer, the first
young adult fantasy novel by
Jasper Fforde, is set herein. It was published in 2010. Our protagonist is Jennifer Strange, a fifteen year-old indentured servant and acting manager of Kazam, an employment agency for soothsayers and sorcerers in a world where
the magic is gradually ebbing away and succumbing to the advent of technology, while the manager Mr. Zambini is away for undisclosed reasons.
One day, a prophecy gets out that she is destined to kill the last surviving dragon, Maltcassion, allowing
Consolidated Useful Stuff to take over the dragon's vast domain and exploit it for financial gain. But Jenny doesn't
want to be the Last Dragonslayer; in fact, she takes a moral stand against it. The book chronicles her adventures as she confronts the problem—and, naturally, Maltcassion himself.
First of a planned trilogy.
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