Spark, by Sarah Beth Durst

I’ve been pre-reading a lot of middle-grade dragon books for my dragon obsessed readers in the house, and this one stood out. (Believe me, there were plenty that did not.)

Mina lives in Alorria, where the weather is controlled by the Guardians and their dragons. Children all over the country enter a lottery and are given an egg that will hatch into a weather controlling dragon—rain dragons, sun dragons, snow dragons, and the daredevil, madcap ones—lightning dragons. The type of dragon that emerges is shaped by the character of the child tending the egg.

Mina is quiet and timid, so when her egg hatches out into Pixit, a lightning dragon, her parents are convinced there’s been a mistake. They bowl over Mina’s protestations that she wants Pixit, and she wants to be a Lightning Guardian. Fortunately for Mina, bureaucracy is inexorable even against irritated parents, and she and Pixit go off to the Lightning Academy to learn how to harvest lightning from storms.

But at the academy she finds that she does not fit in with the other students, either—they are loud thrill seekers, and worse, she cannot seem to harvest lightning with Pixit. Desperately trying to conceal her failure, she flies unprepared into a thunderstorm with the other Guardians, gets lost, and she and Pixit end up injured—outside Alorria. Outside Alorria they discover that the Alorrian system of weather controlling is not without consequences.

The manipulation of weather stirs up massive, life-crushing storms outside the country. The people live in fear, and many die. Mina goes home, burdened with the reality that if she doesn’t find a way to make her voice heard in Alorria, even more will die.

The thing I love about this book is that the solution doesn’t involve Mina morphing into a loud and confident person. Conformity and volume is not the solution. In fact, she finds a way to be heard without raising her voice herself. (Spoiler alert, I guess. I mean, it’s a Middle Grade novel, not George R.R. Martin. You know it has a happy ending.)  

And I also love her relationship with Pixit. There’s plenty of conflict in the book, and there’s tension in the relationship simply because Mina feels like she’s failing Pixit by being unable to gather lightning, but Pixit never has any doubts that Mina is where she belongs. He’s unfailingly encouraging and fond. At the middle grade ages, many readers are just beginning to form deeper friendships themselves, and Pixit and Mina model what a good friendship looks like.

But my daughter disapproves of the art on the front cover, so who knows if I’ll get my middle grade reader to pick it up!