The Dragon Thief

STEALING A BABY DRAGON WAS EASY! HIDING IT IS A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED, IN THIS SEQUEL TO REVIEWER FAVORITE 'DRAGONS IN A BAG'.

Jaxon had just one job - to return three baby dragons to the realm of magic. But when he got there, only two dragons were left in the bag. His best friend's sister, Kavita, is a dragon thief!

Kavita only wanted what was best for the baby dragon. But now every time she feeds it, the dragon grows and grows! How can she possible keep it a secret? Even worse, stealing it has upset the balance between the worlds. The gates to the other realm have shut tight! Jaxon needs all the help he can get to find Kavita, outsmart a trickster named Blue, and return the baby dragon to its true home.

Rating:

Content Tags:

Perfect for readers who want:

• Books about dragons!
• Other worlds and magical creatures.
• Diverse characters and a little diverse history mixed in.
• Heartfelt subplot about finding your place.
• Strong family and friendship themes.

Many thanks to Yearling Books and Rockstar Book Tours for a copy in exchange for an honest, unbiased review and for inclusion on this blog tour.

I enjoyed reading Dragons in a Bag, so I was looking forward to picking up where the story left off. Plus, this series has dragons, so the appeal is pretty obvious!

The Dragon Thief is a diverse adventure into magic, finding your place, and learning to do what is right, even if it’s hard.

I admit that this one lost me a big compared to the first one. I really enjoyed the magic and the adventure, but the whole plot was driven by miscommunication and adults not acting like adults, which is my least favorite trope. I don’t think children will be as put off by this as I am, though!

There are some great themes in this about family and finding your place!

I think this was my favorite part of the book, because it’s deep enough for older readers to really be able to sink their teeth into, but easily digestible for the young target audience.

For example, Aunty, just like the dragon, is trying to find someplace to belong. She feels like an unwanted burden where she is, and she has no real home in particular to return to. Her arc very much mirrors the dragon, and I thought it added some interesting depth to the story as the reader learns more and more about her past.

I think my favorite theme, though, was family! There was so much to dig into here, from the fact that family doesn’t always mean blood, to the fact that sometimes family messes up and may need to be forgiven. Or that despite everything, in the thick of things, family should be there for each other. I just really loved seeing all the different, complicated facets of family life brought up in this book!

There’s a cast of very diverse characters, and I was surprised that I actually learned some things I didn’t know while reading this!

That’s my favorite sort of book: the type that seamlessly tricks you into learning things when you’re not even paying attention. There were a few things brought up that I knew that I don’t think kids necessarily will, and I liked the way it was introduced. I particularly enjoyed the information about India, though, and the different origins of parts of the population. The book doesn’t delve so deep into this that it might start to feel like a history lesson, but it introduces just enough to pique one’s curiosity and interest, which I especially enjoy!

I enjoyed the magic in the first book, but the magic was so much more exciting in this, and I loved the extra look at the magical world!

I’m not even sure how much I can or should say about this part, because you really just need to read it and discover the magic yourself. My favorite part of the first book was the forest of baobabs, which sounds entirely magical and somewhere I’d love to visit.

There wasn’t so much a specific place in this book as more magical creatures, more discovery of the different things people can do with magic, and some interesting facts on how the magical world and our world coexist … or, in some cases, don’t. It just felt like the magic was built up so much more in this book, and I had fun with it.

This entire plot never would’ve happened if adults acted like adults or any amount of communication happened in the first couple of chapters.

This frustrated me so much right from the get-go that I found it hard to get into the plot after that. The story basically consists of two groups attempting to get the dragon back home: one consisting of two young boys and the other a little girl and her Aunty. You’d expect the adult to kind of act like an adult, right? But nope.

At one point, the girl and her Aunty call the boys to ask a very specific question about the date and time the dragons were born (which they can somehow answer, which I think is highly suspect in the first place), and then they just … hang up. No discussion. No questions asked. No setting a place and time to meet up. Which really soured the other half of the book for me, since the boys are still chasing the girls who have the dragon. There’s not even a good reason given as to why the one stinking adult in the group wasn’t like, “Hey, this is what we’re doing and we should meet up.”

Now, of course, this is aaaall from an adult reader’s perspective. I think this probably won’t be a problem for the target audience, who are much less likely to notice or care about this. For me, though, this was a big sticking point, because I just couldn’t see the point of the rest of the book when it could’ve been solved so easily in the first place.

The adults really pile on Jaxon in this, and I was not a fan.

This is another one that, again, I doubt children will recognize or even care about, but from my adult perspective, I did not love this. Mental health is important to me.

Remember, Jaxon is a young kid who, in the first book, discovered magic existed and then a couple hours later was completely abandoned by all the adults in his life to somehow get the dragons back to the magic world. Despite having no directions. Despite only knowing magic existed for all of a few hours. Despite having absolutely no contacts.

Obviously, he didn’t quite succeed, because this book exists, and the rest of the cast makes sure he knows it! Oh my gosh, I was so frustrated by how much these adults piled on Jaxon about how much he had failed them and everything was his fault. He’s a kid, dude.

There’s a small redemption at the end with some actual touching exchange with Jaxon, but it wasn’t quite enough for me, considering how irresponsible they were from the start and then blamed their irresponsibility on a kid.

About Zetta Elliott

I’m a Black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children. I was born and raised in Canada, but have lived in the US for over 20 years. I earned my PhD in American Studies from NYU in 2003; I have taught at Ohio University, Louisiana State University, Mount Holyoke College, Hunter College, Bard High School Early College, and Borough of Manhattan Community College. My poetry has been published in New Daughters of Africa, We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, the Cave Canem anthology The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Check the Rhyme: an Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees, and Coloring Book: an Eclectic Anthology of Fiction and Poetry by Multicultural Writers. My novella, Plastique, was excerpted in T Dot Griots: an Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers, and my plays have been staged in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago. My essays have appeared in School Library Journal, Horn Book, and Publishers Weekly. My picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest and the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. My young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, has been called “a revelation…vivid, violent and impressive history.” Ship of Souls was published in February 2012; it was named a Booklist Top Ten Sci-fi/Fantasy Title for Youth and was a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. My YA novel, The Door at the Crossroads, was a finalist in the Speculative Fiction category of the 2017 Cybils Awards, and my picture book, Melena’s Jubilee, won a 2017 Skipping Stones Honor Award. I received the Children’s Literature Association’s Article Award for my 2014 essay, “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks.” I am an advocate for greater diversity and equity in publishing, and I have self-published numerous illustrated books for younger readers under my own imprint, Rosetta Press; 3 were named Best of the Year by the Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature, and Benny Doesn’t Like to Be Hugged was a first-grade fiction selection for the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Dragons in a Bag, a middle grade fantasy novel, was published by Random House in 2018; the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) named it a Notable Children’s Book. Its sequel, The Dragon Thief, was named a Best Middle Grade Book of 2019 by CBC Books. Say Her Name, a young adult poetry collection, was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in January 2020; A Place Inside of Me: a Poem to Heal the Heart from FSG was named a 2021 Notable Poetry Book by the National Council of Teachers of English. I currently live in Evanston, IL.

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3 lucky winners will win a finished copy of THE DRAGON THIEF
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