Dragonhaven
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. Keeping a preserve for dragons is controversial: detractors say dragons are extremely dangerous and unjustifiably expensive to keep and should be destroyed. Environmentalists and friends say there are no records of them eating humans and they are a unique example of specialist evolution and must be protected. But they are up to eighty feet long and breathe fire.
On his first overnight solo trek, Jake finds a dragon – a dragon dying next to the human she killed. Jake realizes this news could destroy Smokehill - even though the dead man is clearly a poacher who had attacked the dragon first, that fact will be lost in the outcry against dragons.
But then Jake is struck by something more urgent – he sees that the dragon has just given birth, and one of the babies is still alive. What he decides to do will determine not only their futures, but the future of Smokehill itself.
Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley (born 1952 as Jennifer Carolyn Robin Turrell McKinley) is a fantasy author. She won the 1998 Phoenix Award honor book for Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (1978), Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword (1982), Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown (1984), the World Fantasy Award for editing Imaginary Lands (1985) and the Mythopoeic Award for Sunshine (2003).
Book Reviews
Though the premise of the story is interesting, the prose is cumbersome. McKinley has written this tale as if it were written in large part by a teenage boy. The run-on sentences utilized to emulate the thoughts of the narrator make for difficult reading.