Monday, February 20, 2012

Dragon's Milk - 2012 Book #5

Dragon's Milk by Susan Fletcher was a good read. The main character, Kaeldra, has always known she was different. She looks nothing like her sisters, which makes sense, because she was adopted, but she looks nothing like any of the other people in the village either. Her hair and skin are much lighter in color than anyone's in the village, and she is much taller than the average person in the village as well; but the most distinguishing feature is her green eyes. No one in the village has green eyes.

Kaeldra lives with her adopted family which includes her two sisters, her step-mother, and her grandma. She helps watch the sheep with her sisters to provide for her family. One day, her youngest sister gets sick. She doesn't get any better, but continues to get worse. They call for the doctor, and the doctor tells them there is nothing he can do about it; no one knows a cure for this illness. It turns out that this is not true: the grandma has heard of a cure, and she tells Kaeldra a story of a girl who had the same illness many years before. Her parents left her in the mountains, expecting to never see her again. Months later, she climbed down out of the mountains perfectly healthy, as good as new. The only difference was her eyes were green. Just like Kaeldra's. The story says that the girl had been fed dragon's milk, and that afterward, she could talk to dragons. Kaeldra's grandma believes that Kaeldra is descended from this girl, and that is why her eyes are green.

Kaeldra decides to go out and try to find the dragon. She finds the dragon and makes a deal with the dragon. She will watch the dragon's babies in exchange for some milk for her sister. As she returns home with the milk, a visitor arrives. It's a young boy named Jeorg, who claims to be a dragonslayer come to slay the dragon that has been eating the villages sheep. At first, Kaeldra thinks this might be a good idea, until she realizes that her sister needs a lot more milk before she'll be fully recovered. She soon grows to enjoy spending time with the baby draagons, Embyr, Pyro, and Synge, but still fears the mother dragon.

But then, everything changes. Jeorg keeps asking her where the dragon is. Rumors are being spread about the girl with the green eyes, and Kaeldra fears for the lives of the three young dragons. Her grandma tells her of a man named Landerath, who is against the slaying of dragons. Kaeldra believes that if she can just find him, she can stop worrying about the dragons she is protecting. She doesn't know who she can trust, or how she is supposed to continually feed the quickly growing young dragons.

After Kaeldra finds the dragon for the first time, the story gets a little bit slow for a while, but then it picks up more a more as Kaeldra tries to find Landerath while she's also trying to find herself and someplace where she'll fit in.

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