Read New Dragon City free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Mari Mancusi's New Dragon City is a survival adventure for 11 year olds set in a New York that dragons have burned almost to the ground.
Noah is a bookworm living at the end of the world. He and his best friend Maya scavenge the empty streets for tins, batteries and (in Noah's case) library books. Their group of survivors lives in an old hotel in Times Square. Every summer, when the dragons wake up, everyone locks themselves into the subway tunnels until November.
This year the dragons are back a month early. And Noah's dad, a tough survivalist with three dragon kills tattooed on his arm, has decided to stay above ground to search for Noah's mum, who vanished two months ago.
Noah isn't letting him go alone.
It grabs you from the first page, when a dragon chases Noah and Maya into an abandoned flat and they hide in a bathtub while it blasts fire through the door. Noah is easy to like. He's brave without being reckless, he misses his mum terribly, and honestly he'd rather be reading.
Then Noah meets a young dragon, and everything he's been told starts to wobble. There are whispers of a place where people and dragons live side by side. But what would his dad say?
This one sits right at the top of the shelf. The dragons have wiped out most of the world's people, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. Abandoned flats still smell of smoke and death. There are guns, a dad who hunts, and a moment when a dragon snatches one of Noah's group in its claws and carries him off right in front of him.
It's intense. A child who's sensitive to peril and loss might find it too much, especially with Noah's missing mum in the background. For a reader who loves high stakes and big beasts, it's a real page-turner.
If they want another boy who ends up on the dragons' side, try Cornelia Funke's Dragon Rider. Firedrake's hidden valley is about to be found by humans, so he sets off to find a legendary place where dragons never have to run from people again, and a lonely boy called Ben goes with him.
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