Dragon Adventures 3 – Dragon Spear

Jessica Day George's Dragon Spear is a fantasy adventure for 10 year olds whose heroine is a dressmaker with dragons for friends.

What happens

Creel makes dresses. She is very good at it, she has her own shop, and she is engaged to Prince Luka, which his father the king is not remotely happy about. Creel grew up on a failing farm. King Caxel would have preferred a title.

This is not where her story started. Three years earlier her aunt parked her outside a dragon's cave in the hope that a passing knight would rescue her and carry the whole family off to a castle. What Creel got instead was a pair of slippers that started a war, and a friendship with Shardas, the dragon king.

Now the dragons have been thrown out of every country that will have them. They are on the Far Isles, digging new caves, planting gardens and teaching the ones raised in slavery how to find food. Creel and Luka are going to visit for two months. Luka is bringing six buckets of rare black sand, because Shardas wants to try making glass and black sand is the only way to a true red.

Then Velika, the dragon queen, is taken.

The real appeal is how ordinary Creel is about all of it. She frets about her wedding gown getting rained on. She is horrified that her dreadful aunt Reena has installed herself in the palace and tried to sack her apprentice. Shardas is simply a friend she has missed who happens to be enormous and gold. That mixture of domestic fuss and enormous scaly adventure is very appealing.

One thing to flag. Creel is grown up. Her younger brother is seventeen, she runs a business, and a good chunk of this book is about getting married. A ten-year-old reading it is reading up, which is often exactly what a keen reader wants, but do expect a heroine who is nobody's idea of a child.

It also sits well along in the series and assumes you already know the cast. Names arrive quickly and without much explanation.

What to read next

If your reader would rather start where it all began, Dragon Slippers is here too. That is the one with the aunt, the cave, and a girl bargaining with a dragon for her life because nobody at home can afford to keep her.