Dragon Overnight: 02/06/18

Dragon Overnight by Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle, and, Emily Jenkins is the fourth in the Upside-Down Magic series and by far my favorite. Rory and her classmates are on a three day school field trip to a nearby dragon rehabilitation facility in the woods. It's rather like our Sulphur Creek, a local wild animal rehabilitation site that also runs camps for school children.

As happens when a single school isn't sending enough children, these trips end up doubled up with another nearby school. For Rory and friends that means being at the camp at the same time as the private school her father runs! As you can imagine, that makes Rory feel very conflicted. She's glad to see her father but she's also still frustrated that her magic isn't good enough for his school or for him.

Giving Rory a chance to confront her father on neutral territory is good. She finally gets to voice her opinion on what living with her aunt has been like and what she wants her father to do differently. I hope book five will give Rory's dad a chance to be a more sympathetic and present character.

But the thing that really sets this book apart is the work that went into creating all these different dragon species. Dragons here are given the sort of diversity in size and behavior as birds. There's a small species that lives in a hive and individual members glow different colors when they fly. There are melon eating dragons. There are ones that need help learning how to fly but are otherwise docile. There are others that are rare and hard to raise in captivity which is adding to their decline; part of the problem is that they imprint quickly on whomever or whatever they see when they hatch.

The park itself reminds me of a mixture of my Sulphur Creek (for what it does) or even the Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue (as some of the dragons are big and very wild), mixed with somewhere magical like Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island. Regardless, I want to go back there and learn more about the myriad of dragons.

The fifth book, Weather or Not comes out in September.

Five stars

Comments (2)

Comment #1: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 at 22:08:54

MarthaE

This looks adorable! I will look at this series.

Comment #2: Sunday, February 18, 2018 at 21:05:00

Pussreboots

I hope you do. The series so far is: Upside Down Magic, Sticks and Stones, Showing Off, and, Dragon Overnight.