Paper Dragons: The Fight for the Hidden Realm

Siobhan McDermott's Paper Dragons: The Fight for the Hidden Realm is a glittering fantasy for 11 year olds about an outcast girl who'll do almost anything for a place among the immortals.

What happens

Zhi Ging was left as a baby in Fei Chui, a village of Glassmiths on a jade mountain above a sea of clouds. Everyone else's hair crackles with white light when dragons are near. Hers never does. So the Lead Glassmith's spiteful daughter Iridill calls her NoGlow.

Her guardian, the healer Aapau, has been sent away. And the Lead Glassmith has plans for Zhi Ging. She's to scrub out the post pipe, a narrow glass tube full of water where the last two scrubbers drowned.

Her one way out is to be chosen as the village's Silhouette. That means a year's training in Hok Woh, a hidden realm, with the chance of becoming immortal at the end of it.

She sneaks into the Lead Glassmith's office to read the letter early. The name on it isn't hers.

What follows is a string of brilliant set pieces. There's a hunt for a missing jade stone in thick fog, a dragon whose lightning turns sand to glass, and an escape down through the cloud sea. Then Zhi Ging does something that nobody in the whole land should be able to do.

The world is super rich (glass contracts that shatter if you tell a lie!), but Zhi Ging keeps it grounded. She's stubborn, fed up with being passed around and very funny with it. Reishi, the kindly Scout, is a treat too, along with Gahyau, his show-off jellyfish who travels in a floating bubble.

The prologue is eerie and the dragon attack is genuinely frightening. Nothing is gory, though, and readers who like their fantasy with real danger will be gripped.

Does your reader love a magic-school story but fancy one that feels completely new? This is probably it.

What to read next

If they're after another girl hiding what makes her different on her way to a magic school, try Lia Park and the Heavenly Heirlooms. Lia tucks a white streak in her hair out of sight as she arrives at a school that trains kids to fight monsters.