Also by this author: The Promise, The Drummer Boy, Sinner, Green, The Dream Traveler's Quest, Into the Book of Light, The Curse of Shadownman, The Garden and the Serpent, The Final Judgment, Millie Maven and the Bronze Medallion, Nine, Millie Maven and the Golden Vial, Millie Maven and the White Sword, Millie Maven, And They Found Dragons, The Blue Boy and the Red Princess, The Light of the One, The Unknown Path
Series: The Dragon Rider Who Saved the World #1
Published by Scripturo on October 22, 2024
Genres: Children's, Fiction, Fantasy
Buy on Amazon
In a world once filled with both good and evil dragons, all dragons were hunted down and killed.
But a small group of Guardians live in the wasteland, clinging to the promise of a golden dragon and the rider it will choose to save humanity. When tragedy strikes, young Emilia flees the Order, which rules with an iron fist, and is rescued by Oliver, a young Guardian.
Neither can possibly know the wild and dangerous adventure that lays before them when a golden dragon, Darrian, hatches and chooses its rider. The Order, led by a wicked priestess and her armies, will stop at nothing to find and destroy them.
So begins a thrilling and deeply redemptive story of love and wonder.
Set a few hundred years after the events of the And They Found Dragons trilogy and its sequel trilogy The Dragons Among Us, The Dragon Rider Who Saved the World tells the story of a humanity that has forgotten the old stories and hunted the dragons to extinction. While humanity has rebuilt their world, the place it has become is a dystopian authoritarian nightmare. The world is ruled by The Order, who reigns through violence and fear…and who themselves are under the influence of secretly-remaining Dragon King.
I wish that the Dekkers had made this a completely separate series with zero ties to the previous two trilogies. First, The Dragon Rider Who Saved the World is meant to be a standalone trilogy. The connections to the previous stories are tangential and only there to loosely connect the lore from those previous books to this one. In And They Found Dragons, we read about Jack Solomon, a young boy born on a space colony after humanity fled earth because of the dragons. He learns that the Red dragons are nothing but a manifestation of human fear and that perfect love drives out fear. Twenty-five years later, his son, Noah, goes on a similar journey of discovery and vanquishes the dragons.
However, by The Dragon Rider Who Saved the World that history has been obfuscated. We learn that after Jack and Noah’s time, the dragons return and there are one hundred years of war between those who follow the Red dragons—the manifestation of fear—and those who follow the One and His Silver dragons—emblematic of Love. But one hundred and fifty years prior to this current story, a man named Sylas waged war on all dragons and killed them, in the process creating a centralized government called The Order. All this is well and good, but it undermines the core thematic principle of what the Red dragons represent.
If the Reds are manifestations of fear, then there is no killing them except through love. By saying that Sylas killed all dragons, the Dekkers are undermining a key element of their own lore. Of course, it could be that the Histories have it wrong. After all, a Dragon King remains. But that sort of unreliable narration isn’t great for their intended audience age and the series doesn’t read like that at all. The trilogy’s connection to the previous books weakens, rather than strengthens its lore.
All this is sort of minutiae. The series is still good. The theme is strong—even if at this point it is repetitive of the previous books. The writing is solid. The characters are stereotypical but unique. The pacing flows well. It’s a well-written middle-grade fantasy trilogy. But how this series fits into the previous series is kind of just thrown in with no real thought as to the established lore. Am I overthinking a middle-grade series? Maybe. Should it be a problem I have to write about? No.
Really, The Dragon Rider Who Saved the World is a middle-grade dragon-themed rewrite of Rachelle Dekker’s award-winning YA series The Seer. Both series feature an authoritarian government with a highly stratified society, a ragtag resistance, a young female protagonist, and the themes of discovering identity, overcoming fear, and living in the love of God.
The Golden Egg begins the trilogy by introducing us to Emilia. She’s the daughter of a seamstress who works in the palace and her best friend is the princess—Ruth, daughter of the Grand Overseer. Her life falls apart when she confesses to Ruth that her father has been questioning the Order. Ruth tells the Grand Overseer. Emilia’s father is arrested and executed, and Emilia is left on the run for her own life.
She is saved by a small group of Guardians, a resistance group who cling to the prophecy that there will come a Dragon Rider who will save them. For generations, they have guarded a golden dragon egg that will, when the time is right, hatch and reveal a Silver dragon who can take on the Dragon queen.
Again, it feels like the Dekkers wanted to take on a new type of story, but keep the dragons, and sort of keep the system of the way the dragons worked without really committing to it. It muddies the waters, but if you read the story in the present and ignore the lore—there’s a Chosen One who can lead the resistance to defeat the empire—it’s a strong if well-worn story.