Read The Dragonling 2 – A Dragon in the Family free in the Little Reads app.
The Dragonling 2 - A Dragon in the Family by Jackie French Koller is a fantasy for 7 year olds about bringing home a pet nobody else wants.
This isn't where Darek's story starts. He has already found a baby dragon in its dead mother's pouch. He has already carried it back to the Valley of the Dragons, and already worked out that dragons fight only when something threatens their young.
Now he's bringing Zantor home, and his father hasn't really spoken to him for three days.
Darek is nine. In Zoriak, if a child under twelve commits a crime, it's the father who takes the punishment. Darek works that out by the campfire on the last night of the journey and it lands on him like a stone. He loves the dragon. He loves his dad more.
The village cheers when it spots him coming down the pass. Then it sees what's on the end of the chain.
Zantor is the best thing here. He's small enough to shove his head up the back of Darek's tunic when he's frightened, which he does, repeatedly, at the worst possible moments. He licks the sweat off Darek's neck while the Chief Elder is deciding what to do with the pair of them. That's how Darek ends up rolling about in the dust in helpless giggles in front of the entire village.
He also buries two baskets of rotten eggs without being asked and lights a campfire with his mouth.
The rough part comes straight after. A gang of village boys throws those rotten eggs over the paddock wall at Darek and his brother and yells traitor and dragon lover. Darek's older brother Clep says something honest and awful about how he went from hero to murderer in a couple of days. Nobody in this story gets to feel comfortable about the dragon that was killed.
It's a short book that moves briskly from one thing to the next, so it suits a reader who wants a proper fantasy world without a proper fantasy doorstop. There's a whole invented planet in here, with twin moons, yukes to be milked and zoks laying eggs, and it's all handled in about a line each.
For more of Darek and Zantor, the third Dragonling book has another baby dragon taken, and the two of them go after whoever did it.
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