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…
I enjoyed Dragonhaven. The story and concept of dragons is interesting and very well developed. It's surprising and goes places that are unexpected. Toward the beginning I was afraid she was alluding to all sorts of things she wasn't going to explain (I felt like there was a lot of that in Hero and the Crown but I also sort of thought it was because I read it when I was 13 and maybe I just read it too young). But she did explain things eventually and I loved that there was a sense of redemption and healing in some places. I love [a:Robin McKinley|5339|Robin McKinley|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-F-50x66.jpg]'s work and I want to love everything she does.
But, I didn't entirely love this one. The fact that it's written sort of sideways and rambling can sort of be justified by Jake writing it from scattered notes from years ago, except he doesn't sound like a teenage boy. Maybe I only know this from reading Robin McKinley's blog, but it's completely written in her voice, to the point that at times I had to remind myself it's a story about a teenage boy. Her sideways rambling may be perfectly appropriate for her blog but I know she's capable of being far more eloquent in her novels. I'd like to have seen that. And it got kind of annoying how Jake kept going on and on about how he didn't care if we weren't going to believe him, woo woo, crazy. We're willingly reading a book about dragons, we're going to believe you, move on.
I did really enjoy the story and all the characters, and when I reread it I know I pull more from it, but mostly I remember that it isn't really Jake's book, it's hers.
