When a Chinese dragon somehow finds her way to Spratt, Ohio, and bears a litter of nine offspring at The Wilds - a wildlife conservancy run by seventh-grade protagonist John Salt's parents - our hero becomes actively involved in their care. Discovered only ten years before by Dr. Zhao, the dragons soon attract the wrong sort of attention in the form of John’s long-absent Aunt Mary Athena, who descends upon her former home, intent on using the dragonlings in horrific experiments to produce anti-aging cosmetics. Now John must find a way to save the dragons, with the help of his best friend Ham and Ham’s secretly brilliant sister Candi...

I found this work of middle-grade fantasy rather uninspiring, and was unable to work up much interest, either in the plot resolution or in the characters themselves. My initial excitement at discovering a children's fantasy set in the American mid-west (Ohio is my birth-state), soon gave way to boredom with the bland writing and generic plotting. There is far better dragon fantasy out there, whether one is looking for the humorous (think Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles) or the epic (Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern, Laurence Yep’s Dragon books), and it is to these works that I would direct the young reader. ( )