Wings of Fire 13: The Poison Jungle

Tui T. Sutherland's The Poison Jungle is the thirteenth Wings of Fire book, a dragon fantasy for 10 year olds about a young LeafWing with a LOT of anger.

What happens

It opens on a dark night outside a Hive, a huge HiveWing city built out of trees stolen from the LeafWings long ago. Bryony and two older LeafWings are about to burn it down. First, though, a gentle SilkWing called Grayling has to get his own tribe out.

Then we meet Sundew. She's flying home, and she keeps herself going by listing everything she hates. It's mostly HiveWings.

Home is the Poison Jungle, the last wild forest on the continent, where what's left of the LeafWings have lived in secret since the Tree Wars. It's full of snakes, quicksand and plants that eat dragons. She's bringing some very unexpected guests from outside, and nobody there is going to be pleased.

The jungle is brilliant. You'd never guess a flower could be so dangerous until one of Sundew's companions sniffs a giant pink one and gets swallowed whole by a Venus dragon-trap. Sundew's response is basically "I did tell you" (and then she helps pull him out anyway).

She also has a gift that no outsider is supposed to know about. She can make plants grow in a heartbeat, a whole tree shooting up in seconds. Her tribe has spent fifty years hoping one like her would hatch.

She's such fun to read. She's prickly, bossy and very quick to shout. There's a tiny dragonet who adores her and yells "SNUDOO!", which drives her mad. And there's Mandrake, the nervous, kind LeafWing everyone has decided she'll marry one day. She can't even bear the word fiancé.

But she keeps a little jade frog in a pouch over her heart. There's a dragon she is very definitely not thinking about. What's her secret? You'll want to know as much as her friends do.

Heads up, it's quite fierce for this shelf. Sundew daydreams about stabbing her enemies and setting fire ants on them. A whole Hive is set on fire (the SilkWings are warned first). A panther is poisoned, and some LeafWings want Sundew's guests executed. It's angry rather than gory.

This picks up straight after The Lost Continent and The Hive Queen and gives their endings away, so read those first. The whole series begins with The Dragonet Prophecy.

What to read next

If your reader would like another story about dragons hiding from a world that's closing in, Cornelia Funke's Dragon Rider is a lovely next step. Firedrake's dragons live hidden in a misty valley until a rat comes with the news that humans are going to flood it.