Wings of Fire 11: The Lost Continent

The Lost Continent by Tui T. Sutherland is the eleventh Wings of Fire book, a dragon fantasy for 10 year olds that crosses the sea to a land of four-winged dragons.

What happens

It opens two thousand years before the main story. Clearsight, a dragon who can see the future, flies straight into a hurricane to warn the dragons of an unknown continent before it hits them.

Then we meet Blue. He's a SilkWing living in the Hives of Pantala, huge dragon cities linked by silk webs high above the grasslands. SilkWings don't get their wings until a Metamorphosis, and today is his big sister Luna's turn.

Blue likes things the way they are. He's careful, he follows the rules and he spends a lot of time imagining what other dragons are thinking (even the grumpy soldier at the checkpoint). Luna is the opposite. She's bold and cheeky, and she says out loud that SilkWings shouldn't have to put up with being bossed about.

And they are bossed about. The HiveWings run everything. Posters everywhere say the queen sees everything. A snooty shopkeeper won't serve SilkWings. A HiveWing pokes at Blue's wingbuds just because he can.

Meanwhile Luna's wrists are glowing in a way nobody warned them about, and it hurts. Her mum hugged her that morning with a very strange look on her face. What does she know that they don't?

Blue is lovely company. He's worried and gentle and he notices everything. You'll start to see the unfairness right alongside him, long before he lets himself say it.

There are a few sharp edges. Blue remembers the pain of having letters carved into his palm when he was newly hatched. A big mosaic in the garden is full of dragons killed in an old war, and Luna finds that reassuring.

Almost everything here is new, with new tribes, a new queen and a whole new continent. So it's a good place to meet Pantala. The series itself began across the ocean, though, and Clearsight comes from there.

What to read next

If they'd rather start where it all began, The Dragonet Prophecy is the first book in the series. Five young dragons are raised in a cave under a mountain because a prophecy says they'll end a war.