A fantasy series installment that effortlessly informs as it entertains.
Stevens’ (Dragon Lad: The Thirteenth Egg, 2015) middle-grade fantasy sequel finds young Dirk searching for the truth about his past.
In Roman-ruled Britannia, Dirk looks like an average 12-year-old boy, but he actually hatched from a dragon’s egg just seven months ago. Leaving behind his friend, Galinda, on the island of Codhaven, Dirk is searching the lonely, mist-ridden lands for the home of Beldor, High Wizard of the West. At the wizard’s cave, he encounters Ydda, once a “grandmotherly female dragon” and now a human woman, as well as Beldor, who’s merged his consciousness with the dragon Fearclaw’s, with whom he shares a human body. Dirk reveals to them a blue stone talisman that may once have belonged to Gruffen, the Red Dragon of Greenwild. When the boy learns that Gruffen guards a horde of riches, he thinks that acquiring some of it will help him win the acceptance of Galinda’s family. Dirk also thinks that the old dragon may have information about his parents. To outfit this quest, Fearclaw provides the boy with a magical map and a ring that allows him to change between human and dragon forms. As Dirk heads north, he inadvertently loses the ring in the sea while in dragon form. Can he retrieve it and become human again before reaching the town of Isca, where humans may try to kill him? In this rollicking sequel, Stevens combines elements of real-life English history with a shape-shifting–oriented adventure for middle-grade readers. For example, Dirk witnesses the brutality of slavery as Roman soldiers lash Briton workers, but he also teams up with fanciful people such as Leonis, a sea lion who transforms into a human sea captain. Stevens often crafts casually amusing moments, as when Ethelda, the evil woman who raised Dirk, seemingly can’t remember his given name. The protagonist’s dreams and visions frequently guide the plot, which sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed. Still, Stevens’ warm black-and-white illustrations bolster important scenes, as when Dirk meets a mermaid, although truly surreal moments, such as one creature’s transformation from a fly to a dog, remain for audiences to imagine. A joyous ending leaves the cast on a fine footing for the next installment.
A fantasy series installment that effortlessly informs as it entertains.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9963839-3-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Dragon's Egg Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
