The Dragonling 4 – Dragons of Krad

Jackie French Koller's Dragons of Krad is the fourth Dragonling book, a fantasy adventure for 7 year olds about a boy who follows his dragon into the one place nobody ever comes back from.

What happens

Darek's little Blue dragon, Zantor, and his best friend Pola have disappeared into the Black Mountains of Krad, carried off with three other baby dragons by a runaway wagon. Darek and Rowena, the Chief Elder's daughter, blame themselves. So they go in after them. A short prologue catches you up on how it all happened.

Krad is a grim place. The mist over the mountains stinks and makes your head swim. On the other side live the Kradens, huge furry men who keep Zorian children as prisoners. Anyone who arrives is given a green potion by an old woman called Jazee, and it wipes their memory.

So Darek ends up mucking out dragon stalls next to Pola without knowing who he is. There's a small Blue dragonling in the nursery who won't leave him alone, though. It keeps licking his face and nosing at his pocket. Can you guess who it is?

That's the best bit. Slowly, the dragon sends Darek pictures in his head of a farm, a boy and a dragon playing, and then the dragon's name comes back to him. The friendship between boy and dragon is what holds the whole book together.

It's worth knowing this one gets dark for age 7. The Kradens bind the baby dragons' wings so they can never fly. They raise them as food for their Red Fanged dragons, and there are charred dragon bones in the Red Fangs' pen. The prisoners get whipped. One of the young Blues the children have been secretly training is taken and fed to the Red Fangs (it happens off the page, but it's sad). Darek also takes an arrow in the leg.

A child who finds harm to animals upsetting might struggle with it. A reader who loves a daring rescue and has already fallen for Zantor will probably be gripped, and it's short enough to read together if you'd rather be close by.

This is book four, so it helps to know the earlier ones, although the prologue does a good job of filling in the gaps.

What to read next

If your reader wants to go back a step first, Dragon Quest is the book just before this one. It's the story of how Rowena ends up desperate for a dragonling of her own, and why that matters so much here.