Dragonhaven - Softcover

McKinley, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 044101643X ISBN 13: 9780441016433

Publisher: Ace, 2008

Synopsis

Think of yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside—and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can’t stand on her hind legs and not bump her head—and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try.

Jake lives with his scientist father 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.

There are five million acres of the Smokehill wilderness and the dragons rarely show themselves. Jack’s never seen one except deep in the park and at a distance. They stay away from the Institute—and the tourists. But dragon conservation is controversial. Detractors say dragons are much too dangerous and much too expensive, and should be destroyed. Supporters say there is no record of their doing anything more threatening than eating sheep, there are only a few hundred of them left at best and they must be protected.

But they are up to eighty feet long (plus tail) and breathe fire.

On Jake’s first overnight solo in the park, he meets a dragon—the thing that he would have said he wanted above everything else in the world. But this dragon is dying—dying next to the human she has killed. Jake knowns this news could destroy Smokehill. The dead man is clearly a poacher who attacked first, but that will be lost in the outcry against dragons. But then Jake notices something even more urgent: the dragon has just given birth, and one of the babies is still alive...

About this title

About the Author:

Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown and a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword. Her other books include Sunshine; the New York Times bestseller Spindle's End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and Rose Daughter; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 7 Up—A novel set in an alternate contemporary world. Viewing dragons as fire-breathing, non-sentient animals with gigantic appetites for livestock, humans have hunted them for centuries, and now they survive only in a few wilderness havens. Jake Mendoza has grown up at one such haven, the Smokehill National Park in the American West, and has inherited his scientist parents' commitment to the park's secret inhabitants. When he rescues an orphaned baby dragon, he sets in motion a cascade of events that may eventually save these top predators from extinction. Readers will find the book to be less about the joys of the human-dragon bond and more about the challenges of raising an infant and communicating in a vastly different language. As an exhausted Jake explains, he is the first human in history to find out that a marsupial baby dragon out of its mother's pouch still expects a round-the-clock source of food, warmth, and company for over a year. Also, their telepathic communication gives Jake and his fellow Smokehill residents debilitating head-aches, and no one on either side is ever entirely sure they've got the message right. Once readers get through Jake's overdone teenage diction in the first few chapters, they will be engaged by McKinley's well-drawn characters and want to root for the Smokehill community's fight to save the ultimate endangered species.—Beth Wright, Fletcher Free Library, Burlington, VT
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About this edition

• Publisher: Ace
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 044101643X
• ISBN 13: 9780441016433
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 352