Robin McKinley
Dragonhaven
Now available
Putnam, September 2007
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I keep having these conversations with Dad.
"Have you started on it yet, Jake?"
"No," I say, probably more belligerently than I mean to. But we've had this conversation so often.
Dad sighs. "Jake, I know I'm nagging you. But it's important."
"I don't know how — I can't make it a story!" I shout, or rather, I don't shout. I want to shout. "It's not... it doesn't have... there's no..." I can't think how to finish. I can't think how to begin.
"Just do the best you can," Dad says, really gently. "You're the only one who can tell it at all."
Part I, Continued
Jake Mendoza lives at the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in Smokehill National Park. Smokehill is home to about two hundred of the few remaining Draco australiensis, which is extinct in the wild. Australiensis has always been controversial: its detractors say it is extremely dangerous and unjustifiably expensive to keep and should be pre-emptively destroyed. Its friends say there are no records of it eating humans and it is a unique example of specialist evolution and must be protected. But it is up to eighty feet long and breathes fire.
On his first overnight solo in the park, Jake finds a dying dragon. A dragon dying next to the human she killed. Jake knows this news could destroy Smokehill — that the dead man is a poacher and had killed her first will be lost in the outcry against dragons.
Then he notices that this dragon had just given birth, and one of the babies is still alive.
And it is a federal offence to assist in the preservation of the life of a dragon.
Putnam Juvenile
September 20, 2007
ISBN: 0399246754
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