Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy by Tui T. Sutherland (Fantasy)

Clay and his 4 friends, Sunny, Starflight, Tsunami, and Glory, all live inside of a mountain trapped there by the ones who care for them. They are the Dragonets of Destiny, prophesied dragons destined to stop the great SandWing war. The SandWings, a tribe of dragons, have been waging war against the other tribes for the past 100 years. It started as just a dispute between SandWing queens, but one of them named Blister roped her allies into it, forcing each of the dragon tribes to take sides and to fight in a war that wasn't their own. Clay and his friends have trained under the mountain for years now, never seeing the outside world. After all that time, they're finally ready to try and make an escape, to get out from the mountain. Their escape attempt is successful, but they soon learn that the outside world is more dangerous than they had ever imagined. Mere hours after leaving the mountain, they are captured by the SkyWing queen, and taken prisoners to their palace. All prisoners of the SkyWings are forced to fight for their life against other prisoners in Queen Scarlet's arena, and the dragonets are no exception. They each survive until they are pitted against each other, and refuse to fight. Along the way, they meet a very unique SkyWing named Peril. She has something about her that makes her scales incredibly hot. Clay and her become friends, but Clay soon learns that she is the Queen's champion fighter, her life dedicated to killing prisoners in the arena. When the dragonets later attempt to escape, Peril's loyalty is truly tested. She has to decide between the dragonets, and her queen. She ends up betraying the dragonets for her queen. However, in the end, the dragonets still manage to escape when Glory discovers an ability that she never knew she had: the ability to shoot acid from her fangs. She hits queen Scarlet with it and causes panic among the SkyWings. The dragonets use this opportunity to escape.

To start, I just want to say that I absolutely loved this book. I think that anyone who is even remotely interested in the fantasy genre would very much enjoy this book. The story is engaging and hard to put down. The characters are well developed, but leave just enough to the imagination for you to have your own opinions and thoughts about this. Thinking beyond the book itself, this allows much of the Wings of Fire community to have very diverse thoughts and opinions about characters, tribes, places, and a lot more. It makes the book a lot more interesting in my opinion. I feel like the book could have done a little bit better with its pacing however. A lot of parts felt quite slow, and didn't really add much to the story. This aside, another really well done part of this book was the way it sets itself up for a sequel. This series is nearly 15 books long, with more coming out, so the author really had to be careful to leave plenty of context left in the world to use for coming books. This book masterfully explored enough of the world to make a very interesting story, while still leaving so much more to be discovered and written about. 

Reviewed by Connor E., Grade 9