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Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy by Tui T. Sutherland is a big dragon fantasy for 10 year olds, and it's the first book in the series.
Clay is a MudWing dragonet. He's been raised in a cave under a mountain with four other young dragons. A group called the Talons of Peace took them as eggs, because a prophecy says five dragonets will end the war tearing their world apart.
The trouble is, Clay doesn't feel like a hero. He likes sleeping more than studying. He'd rather talk than fight. His battle teacher wants a killer, and Clay feels about as dangerous as cauliflower.
The three dragons minding them are harsh. Glory the RainWing gets called a mistake. Sunny gets called harmless. So Tsunami, the bossy SeaWing, starts planning an escape.
Then Morrowseer turns up. He's the NightWing who made the prophecy in the first place, and he's coming to look them over.
You're inside Clay's head the whole way. He's big and clumsy and worried about everyone else, which makes him very easy to root for.
It's funny too. The five of them bicker like brothers and sisters. They act out dragon history as a play, with a pile of rocks standing in for the treasure. Starflight can't stop lecturing, and Sunny's fierce hunting cry isn't very fierce at all.
There are seven dragon tribes, each with its own powers. A guide to all of them sits at the front of the book, which is handy to flick back to.
This one is violent, and it starts early. In the prologue a dragon has his wings shredded and a poisoned tail stabbed through his skull. Later a dragon bites a human's head off. The dragonets watch a dragon they know get killed. And a queen makes her prisoners fight to the death in an arena, for fun.
A sensitive reader, or one who hates seeing characters hurt, could find that too much. If yours already reads fantasy with proper battles in it, they'll probably race through this and want the next one straight away.
If they're after more dragons afterwards, Legends of the Sky opens with a girl hiding in an orange tree on the day the dragons come back. It's in the library too.
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