By Tracey West
A farm boy is whisked off to the king's castle to secretly train a dragon of his own, and discovers he can talk to it.
Eight-year-old Drake is pulled off his family's onion farm in the middle of the night and brought to King Roland's castle, where he learns he's been chosen to be a Dragon Master. Each Dragon Master is paired with a dragon and trained in secret by the wizard Griffith. Drake's dragon is Worm, a long brown Earth Dragon who doesn't look like much at first, but the two of them slowly figure each other out, and Drake discovers he can hear Worm's thoughts. Short chapters, big type, and a black-and-white drawing every few pages make it feel like a real fantasy adventure without ever getting heavy.
This is the fantasy fix for a young child who wants dragons and magic but isn't ready for a thick, tense middle-grade quest. The stakes are small and the tone is warm: the real story is a lonely boy and an odd dragon becoming a team. Chapters are short, the vocabulary is manageable, and there's a picture often enough to keep momentum. And there are more than twenty books in the series, so if your child clicks with it, you've bought yourself a very long stretch of bedtimes.