and there be dragons... in middle grade fiction
My students are super excited about dragons. They love Tui Sutherland's series Dragonwings but these two new ones are going to thrill them! The first one is by one of my favorite authors, Sarah Beth Durst. If you missed it, she wrote an amazing magical story called "The Girl Who Could Not Dream" that had one of the best characters (Monster) that I've read in a long time. Her newest one, Spark, is about a girl named Mina who is quiet and lives with her very noisy family in a country called Aloria. Aloria is special because they always have perfect weather, thanks to storm beasts and their guardians. There are different kinds of storm beasts, wind, rain, sun, snow, and lightning that each provide things that their country needs. The guardians spend two years bonding with their storm beast while it's still inside the egg, but they don't know what kind it will be until it hatches. Everyone is very surprised then, when Mina's egg hatches and it is a lig...