Dragon Adventures 2 – Dragon Flight

Jessica Day George's Dragon Flight is the second book about Creel, for 9 year olds who want a dragon adventure with a dress shop in it.

What happens

A year after the Dragon War, Creel is a dressmaker. She and her business partner Marta have a shop, an assistant, more orders than they can fill and a fitting appointment with the countess who is about to marry the crown prince. Creel is very good at her job. She is also bored, and quietly miserable, because she is in love with Prince Luka and shopkeepers do not marry princes.

People call her the Heroine of the Dragon War. She hates it.

What almost nobody knows is that two dragons came out of the Boiling Sea alive. Shardas the gold and Velika, the queen of the dragons, dragged each other through an underwater tunnel into a cave system and have been hiding by a lake ever since, healing.

Healing slowly. Creel visits with ham and sausages and peaches, because a dragon who cannot fly cannot hunt. She spends her days there pulling the dead scales off Shardas's back so the new ones underneath can come through, and filing his spines flat, which she says is like giving a manicure to a giant.

That is the part that may land hard with a tender reader. The burns get described properly. Melted scales cooling into stiff armour. Wing membranes burned away and growing back looking like badly made lace. A dragon queen who will not come out into the sunlight and cannot bear to be touched by a human. It is sad rather than gory, and it is also the warmest thing in the book, because Creel is the friend who turns up and does the horrible scratchy jobs nobody else will.

Then a letter arrives from Luka, written in a hurry, and a country nobody in the dress shop can even find on a map has declared war.

Creel is very good company. She is blunt, dry and entirely unimpressed by rank, which is how she gets away with telling a countess that purple embroidery on a yellow gown with green ribbons would certainly be stunning, but perhaps not in a good way. The dragons are funnier still. Feniul arrives, takes one look at the shingle and complains that the footing is treacherous and Creel really ought to have swept the pebbles up by now.

Fair warning that this one starts by assuming you already know Creel, the war and what Princess Amalia's slippers did. Your reader will get far more out of it in order.

What to read next

The book those slippers came from opens with Creel's aunt deciding to leave her outside a dragon's cave in the hope that a passing knight will rescue her and marry her. It does not go to plan.