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Leah Mohammed's Luma and the Pet Dragon is a pair of warm, funny stories for 6 year olds about a girl who wanted a puppy and got a dragon instead.
It's Luma's seventh birthday and she's been waiting for it for ages. She's getting a puppy from the rescue centre. She even has a name ready (Chloe, obviously). But when they get there, all the girl puppies have gone.
Luma is heartbroken. So Mum sends her next door to Nani, who gives her a very special present. It's Nani's own gold charm bracelet, with a tiny black and gold dragon on it.
Then something grey and scaly pokes its nose out of the bushes. It has silver cat's eyes, stubby horns and a spiky tail with an arrow on the end. "Want it," it says, and pinches the bracelet!
His name is Timir. Around Luma he's a proper talking dragon. Around everyone else he turns into a scruffy grey puppy. And Nani, it turns out, knows a LOT more about dragons than she's been letting on.
Timir is brilliant. He talks like a toddler ("Mine!" and "I get it!") and he's naughty in all the ways a puppy is. He shreds teddies, steals rubber ducks from the bath and gobbles two birthday candles. Who wouldn't want one?
There's a lovely gentle moment too. Timir won't come out from under the bed because he's guarding a scrap of his eggshell. Luma offers to keep it in the music box her grandad gave her before he died, right next to her own most precious thing. It's handled so kindly, and it's a memory rather than anything sad happening.
In the second story Timir has to pass as a dog for a whole day. Luma's older cousin Arjun is watching. Dogs don't bounce on trampolines. Dogs don't make mud pies. Dogs definitely don't watch cartoons. Luma gets more and more worried!
The chapters are very short, with lots of talking, so it's great for a newly confident reader or for sharing at bedtime.
Luma's story carries on in Luma and the Hiccupping Dragon. Timir wakes up at Nani's with a terrible case of the hiccups, and Nani says that means his flame is on its way.
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