Dragon Storm – Mira and Flameteller

Alastair Chisholm's Mira and Flameteller is a Dragon Storm adventure for 8 year olds about a girl who loves machines and a dragon who looks like clockwork.

What happens

Mira is a dragonseer. She can call her dragon, Flameteller, into our world. He's bronze and brown with silver spots, and his stiff legs make him look a bit like a wind-up toy. Every time she sees him her heart sings.

They live in secret, in the Dragonseer Guild Hall, a huge cavern hidden under the city of Rivven. They have to. The king hates dragons.

And things are about to get worse. Posters go up all over the city, and the king's son tells a cheering crowd they'll search every building until they find the dragons and anyone helping them.

Meanwhile Mira gets her dream job. She's sent to help Grimbal, the grumpy engineer who keeps the whole Hall running, and all he lets her do is sweep! But the lights are flickering. Flameteller can hear a wrong note in the machinery, like music out of tune. And Mira just HAS to take a look.

Her excitement about gears and cogs is so catching. On a school trip to a giant waterwheel she fires off so many questions that her teacher blinks and leaves her to it. Her friend Erin tells her she's weird (with a grin).

When things go badly wrong, Mira feels terrible and cries into her pillow. Then there's a lovely moment where Hilda the cook gives her a warm pasty and tells her grown-ups mess up all the time. Hilda's pasty recipe took her seventeen goes, and she once set the oven on fire!

It mentions some earlier adventures (Ellis has already found a magic jewel called the Dragon's Eye), but Mira's story follows on easily enough.

What to read next

If you've got a child who takes things apart to see how they work, they'll love her. And if they're hooked on dragonseers, go back to Tomas and Ironskin, where a blacksmith's son sees a dragon's face hissing his name in the forge fire.