Review by Booklist Review
Milla is a servant girl on the island nation of Arcosi, where legend has it that dragons once lived. Milla works as a runner for a pair of twin nobles, Tarya and Isak, and as Duke Olvar is throwing a ball when the story starts, she's quite busy. But during her rush around the island, she witnesses a man's murder and discovers that he hid a bag of dragon eggs before his death. Duke Olvar, naming himself The Dragon Duke, is determined to own whatever hatches out of those eggs, and if he has to take prisoners to do it, he will. But he'll be disappointed when the dragon hatchlings choose four teenagers Milla, Tarya, Isak, and the Duke's own son, Vigoas as their masters. After the eggs hatch, the Duke changes everything about how Arcosi works, setting stringent immigration laws to protect his dragons and their riders. While the immigration storyline is timely, the plot takes considerable time to get going and flows in a predictable manner. Buy for large collections only.--Stacey Comfort Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An orphan foundling finds four dragon eggs on an island nation that's divided by nationalism and bigotry.Twelve-year-old Milla works in the household of a wealthy merchant and his children, the twins Isak and Tarya. Though the twins are privileged, white Norlanders and Milla is their brown-skinned servant of uncertain parentage, the three children are dear friends. But in one chaotic day, Milla witnesses a murder, Isak learns he's being sent away to learn a trade, Tarya's told she'll be marrying the duke's only sonand then there are the eggs. The murdered man hid a sack containing four dragon eggs before he was killed, and only Milla saw him do it. The children are soon pulled into political intrigue against their will, as their island of Arcosi (realized with Italian inflections and colonized by the vaguely Nordic Norlanders) is torn apart by the nationalist bigotry of the duke's police state. Is the return of dragons a sign that things are improving for Arcosi? Or is it just another reason for the increasingly paranoid duke to harm the most vulnerable? Despite shakiness in the story's logic, there's a reason that tales of penniless nobodies forming life bonds with dragons have enduring popularity, and this book falls squarely into that winning formula."Cinderella" plus dragons is an always-appealing trope; the anti-racist polemic adds some flavor. (Fantasy. 9-11) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
