A DRAGON USED TO LIVE HERE

The winding tale skeptical Thomas and his pesky but acute little sister, Emily, tease out of crusty Meg McThorn, supervisor of the castle scriptorium, includes a fire-breathing dragon, knights, wee folk, and the possibility of hidden treasure—and so seems hard to believe.

However, as Meg tartly asserts, it’s not a “Once upon a time” thing but “a completely true story, with real people I actually know.” But was the siblings’ mother really once the dragon’s captive—until she helped their father “rescue” her? Are there crocodiles in the moat? And gryphons and tricksy pixies in the nearby woods? Tucking scores of cozy, crosshatched sketches into her short chapters as well as sly literary winks in the form of ironic banter and sibling squabbles (Emily, despite being only 9, nearly always comes out on top), Cate nets readers in a web of story as deftly as Meg nets her own audience of two. As past becomes prologue to what happens after the children have adventures of their own, and their noble parents finally come back from, as Thomas puts it, “a stuffy conference about moldy old books and scrolls and manuscripts written in languages no one speaks anymore,” Meg’s yarn turns out to be verifiably true…or mostly. The female contingent leads the all-White cast, but the boys and men put on decent enough showings, and despite occasional fraught turns, no one, draconic or otherwise, ends up slain.

Clever, multistranded, and off the charts in read-aloud potential.