Read Legends of the Sky free in the Little Reads app.
Liz Flanagan's Legends of the Sky is a gripping fantasy for 9 year olds about a servant girl who sees a murder and ends up guarding a secret worth killing for.
Milla is twelve and the youngest servant in a rich merchant's house in Arcosi, a city on an island. Everyone shouts for her the moment they see her. So she hides in an orange tree for five minutes' peace.
That's where she is when a stranger hooks a silk bag with four padded pockets onto the branch right beside her. Moments later a masked man attacks him in the courtyard below, and he's killed.
Milla keeps quiet and keeps the bag. She promises the dead man she'll look after it. And inside are four dragon eggs, in a city where dragons are only legends now, carved over doorways and painted on old walls.
The same night there's a grand ball at the palace, where the duke announces he'll now be called the Dragon Duke. Then an old woman in the crowd stands up and tells him the city was never his.
It's a proper page-turner. Milla is brave and loyal and a brilliant listener, and she knows every shortcut and smugglers' staircase in the city. Her friends, the twins Tarya and Isak, are great company too. Tarya practises sword-fighting in secret, dressed as her brother (she isn't supposed to learn).
There's a lot going on under the adventure. Soldiers stop people in the street to check their papers, and a young man is dragged away for losing his. At the ball, a woman looks at Milla's brown skin and asks who let her in. Milla notices all of it, and your reader will too.
The murder happens in the first chapter and it's on the page. It's quick, but there's a knife at a throat, a spray of blood and a body dragged away, and Milla feels sick for a long while afterwards. It's darker than a lot of books on this shelf.
A child who is upset by violence might find that opening hard going. If you've got a reader who likes real danger in their fantasy, and a heroine who's brave because she's frightened and does it anyway, this is a very good choice.
If it's the dragons they fall for, try Cornelia Funke's Dragon Rider, about a young dragon called Firedrake hiding in a misty valley, who hears that humans are on their way.
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