The Dream Keeper Saga 02 – The Prince and the Blight

Kathryn Butler's The Prince and the Blight is the second Dream Keeper Saga book, a fantasy for 9 year olds about a girl whose creations keep coming to life.

What happens

Lily has already visited the Somnium Realm once, a world of dreams with dragons in it. She came home with a cracked piece of a glowing stone. Now the stone won't behave.

Whenever it glows, things wake up. A papier-mâché pterodactyl flaps off the art bench in the middle of class. A plate of scrambled eggs becomes a blob called Glorf. There's a rabbit in a top hat who reads National Geographic (and turns out to speak with a French accent), a shrub shaped like a dog and a pair of slithering shoelaces.

Lily has been hiding them all in a treehouse in the woods. Then one morning they break out. Glorf leaves a trail of butter straight into the school kitchen, and Lily has to chase him there in her panda pyjamas.

It's the funniest chapter in the book, and it ends with a dragon bursting into the kitchen. Cedric, Lily's friend from the Realm, has come to fetch her. Something's wrong back there. And time runs differently in the Realm, so for Cedric forty years have gone by.

Underneath the fun there's a lot of heart. Lily's a daydreamer who feels out of place at school. In the Realm, having her head in the clouds finally counted for something. At home nobody wants to talk about it, and she hates keeping secrets from the people she loves.

There's a brilliant new character too. Keisha is clever, new in town and saw the pterodactyl with her own eyes. She wants in. She has a notebook and a LOT of questions.

Is it scary? A little. There are hints of the dark things Lily faced last time, and the Realm is clearly in trouble. But the opening chapters are mostly warm and very silly.

What to read next

If you'd rather start at the beginning, the first Dream Keeper book is Dragon and the Stone. It opens with Lily coming home from school to find a dragon eating her mum's chilli.