By Tui T. Sutherland
Five dragonets, hatched to fulfill a prophecy and stop a long dragon war, escape the mountain where they were raised and start deciding for themselves who to be.
Clay, Tsunami, Glory, Starflight, and Sunny have never seen the open sky. The five dragonets have spent their whole lives hidden in a cave under a mountain, raised by guardians who are grooming them to fulfill a prophecy that's meant to end a war among the seven dragon tribes. That war has been going for twenty years, and nobody ever asked the dragonets whether they wanted the job. When they finally break out to see the world, they're captured almost at once and handed to a cruel queen who runs an arena where dragons are forced to fight. From there it's a scramble to figure out who they can trust, how to get free, and how far they'll go to keep each other alive. It's a big, mapped-out world of tribes and feuds and politics, and it's all prose with no pictures, so a child settles in for a long stretch.
You know the child who'll stay glued to a game for an hour but calls a book boring after two pages? This is one I'd hand that child, because it gives a reader what a game gives: a giant world with its own rules and tribes, a team to belong to, and a plot that keeps raising the stakes. It's all text, no pictures, so it asks a reader who's ready to build the dragon world in their own head — and once they can, they're gone. Parents write in about this one because their child has torn through fifteen of them and wants the sixteenth. If yours takes to it, you've found the thing that keeps them in a chair for hours instead of on a screen.