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A young heroine finds danger as well as friendship and hope in a cold war America populated with dragons
In Patrick Ness’s latest novel, dragons exist, in all their fire-breathing glory. The initial setting is 1950s America, against the backdrop of the cold war. An uneasy human/dragon truce has been in place for hundreds of years, but the community’s distrust of outsiders runs high. Racist cops patrol the roads, using violence to intimidate the weak. The heroine, 16-year-old Sarah, suffers the worst of such prejudices: her parents were in a mixed marriage, and she’s in love with a local Japanese boy. Her mother has recently died, and her father is struggling to keep their farm going. To help, he hires a Russian blue dragon to clear some fields by burning them: payment, of course, is in gold.
Ness is on tip-top form here, deftly propelling a complex plot. Sarah seems to be at the nexus of a prophecy about the end of the world, and a young assassin named Malcolm, part of a dangerous cult that worships dragons, sets out on her trail; two FBI agents are close behind. Filmic scenes offer striking images: a car flying through the air in the claws of a dragon, a shoot-out straight from Quentin Tarantino. Continue reading...