Welcome to the Edge of Fantasy, a blog review series where I review everything from books, to fantastic arts and crafts from around the web. If it's creative, and has anything to do with fantasy, I'm interested, and want to share what I think with the world, so here we go! We're on the edge, the edge of fantasy, and it's time to dive right in.
Today I'm going to talk about a book I read as a youngster and recently revisited, only now realizing how good of a story it actually was. Carole Wilkinson's Dragon Keeper is the first book in a series of children's fantasy novels set in ancient China, centering around a young girl named Ping as she learns to be come a dragon keeper, a special caretaker of the Imperial Dragons, which are now all but extinct thanks to the actions of an emperor who was bitten by one of the creatures as a child. He had them banished to a far away mountain called Huangling. This is where the story begins.
Ping is a slave girl who is probably around twelve years old. Apparently not even she knows how old she is because she was abandoned by her parents as a small child. She ends up becoming the slave of the current dragon keeper, a very messy and overly demanding man who amuses himself by throwing things at our heroine. Life is pretty miserable for her as she cleans up after her master, struggles to find food, and does more chores in a day than most children would normally do in two weeks. (She cleans up after pigs goats and cattle, sounds like fun, right?) Well, things aren't completely dull. She has one friend, a rat named Hua, who is sort of like this story's R2-D2, an eccentric little fellow who always gets himself into trouble in the most comedic of ways. He spends a lot of his time hiding in Ping's robes to keep out of sight, sometimes showing up at the most inopportune of moments. Along with Hua's antics, Ping has two other creatures that distract her from her otherwise boring life as a slave. Kept in a cave in Huangling Mountain are a pair of Imperial Dragons, the last two left alive, but there is a problem. Both of them seem to be dying, and one day, one of them does. The current dragon keeper pays the death no mind, until he learns that the new emperor is coming to visit Huangling Palace. He fears that he will be punished for failing in his duties to care for the dragons, and hopes that the emperor won't ask about them.
When the emperor arrives in Huangling, he brings with him a dragon hunter, who wants to kill the dragons for sport, and to sell their organs as medicine. Ping learns about the dragon hunter and attempts to help the last surviving dragon escape. She succeeds in getting away with the great creature, bringing with her a mysterious stone that the dragon had been protecting in its cave. To make things worse for Ping, the emperor is accidentally poisoned during his dinner at the palace, and she is blamed for his death. Now no longer able to return to her home at Huangling, Ping finds herself on the run from the Imperial Army and the dragon hunter, who will stop at nothing to kill the dragon who calls himself Danzi. Ping learns that she can understand the dragon's language, and during her adventures with the creature, Danzi begins to teach her about what gives dragons their mystic powers. He teaches her how to use Chi to manipulate objects without actually touching them. She's not very good at first, (She can hardly lift a leaf), but as time goes on she eventually begins to hone her skills and become ever more efficient in the use of her Chi.
Danzi the dragon is determined to reach the ocean, for reasons that he never explains, much to Ping's annoyance. He is also obsessed with protecting the stone that Ping took with her when they escaped the palace in Huangling Mountain. The middle section of the book is primarily focused on the many misadventures the unlikely pair encounter on their way to the ocean. They evade thieves, imperial soldiers, and the dragon hunter, and with every dangerous encounter, Ping grows ever more connected with the dragon stone, up to the point where she can almost hear it speaking to her in her mind.
Eventually Danzi bestows upon her the title of Dragon Keeper, and she learns how to completely control her Chi. She defeats the dragon hunter in an epic fight in the third act of the story, and successfully brings Danzi to the ocean. Far out to sea is an island where old dragons go to finish out their years, and to live in peace. In a rather heartbreaking scene, the dragon must leave Ping in order to survive, but he leaves the dragon stone behind for her to care for, and before Danzi leaves, the stone begins to crack, and it opens, revealing that the stone was actually an egg the entire time, a dragon egg. Ping is left to care for the egg as the new and rightful dragon keeper, and as Danzi flies off towards his far away island, Ping contemplates what her future will bring. She will have to raise a young dragon in a dangerous world that despises the creatures, not to mention the fact that the Empire still thinks of her as a criminal. Despite the challenges that lie ahead for Ping, the book ends on a hopeful note that encourages the reader to read the second book in the series to learn what happens next.
When I picked up the book a few weeks ago, I must admit that the first few chapters were a bit on the stale side, but once Danzi and Ping escape Huangling the story really gets going. Carole Wilkinson manages to fit a lot of exposition and character development into the story without bogging down the progress of the adventure, and she really captured the flavor of old Chinese legends about dragons and magic. Ping's character development was exceptional and was the highlight of the story. She went from a very stubborn, not-so-intelligent little girl, into a wise and courageous girl who can act as an excellent role model for young girls in real life. It was refreshing to read an adventure story on this scale, which would have been traditionally told from the perspective of a young boy, from the point of view of a female.
Although the story clocks in at 333 pages, it is written in a way that young children should be easily able to understand and enjoy. The few extra pages in the back of the book explain how to pronounce the Chinese names and words mentioned throughout the story. These pages also explain ancient Chinese methods of measurement, for instance: a Li is a measure of distance equal to about three tenths of a mile. Carole Wilkinson clearly put a lot of effort and research into this story, and for that, and the sheer entertainment value, I give the book four out of five stars. If you're a kid (or a kid at heart) that wants an exciting adventure set in an exotic land and time period, The Dragon Keeper is the fantasy for you.
Labels: action, adventure, author, bad, book, children, dragons, fantasy, fun, good, knight, literature, novel, reading, review, writing
