Book Review: Dragon's Apprentice

Title: The Dragon's Apprentice

Author: James Riley

Date: 2025

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: 978-0-593-81319-5

Quote: "[W]hy hadn't everyone learned magic like the Dragon Mage had promised?"

This novel takes place in a fairy-tale sort of setting with a twist. Dragons are real. Mostly they don't like humans. Magic is real. Most people don't know any. About a thousand years ago, the woman remembered as the Dragon Mage enlisted a few dragons to teach a few young people how to use Dragon Magic, especially to cure the malady called the Skael Cough. Mage, dragons, and their "apprentices" all vanished. Now Skael has a Warden who claims to speak for the Dragon Mage, a dreadful armored warrioress who tells people to obey the Warden and not try to learn anything about magic or dragons for themselves until the Warden brings her back--and it also has the journal of Bianca, one of the "apprentices" and an ancestor of young Ciara ("Key-ra"), who reads the journal. She knew the Warden was corrupt and mean, before reading the journal, because he's withholding medication for the Skael Cough from her mother. While hiding from the Warden and trying to read the journal, which asserts that the Mage was a plump, giggly woman who wanted everyone to learn magic, Ciara inadvertently summons Bianca's dragon teacher, Scorch. Then she's in real trouble.

Scorch maintains throughout the book that he doesn't want to teach Ciara. Of course, by the end of the book, he will. You knew that by the whimsical picture on the jacket. They will confront the Warden. They will heal Ciara's mother. They will find out what happened to the Mage, dragons, and apprentices. The only suspense is finding out how.

Despite the jacket cover that suggests that this book is meant for the primary grades, it's written for the middle grades. It will even hold the interest of fantasy-friendly adults reading it to younger children, once.

I happen to like the pro-sharing, anti-censorship theme in this book so I need to persuade you that that's not all there is to like about it. It's clever, cute, funny, even suspenseful if you care about the "how" of its foregone conclusion, and kids may enjoy the way the dragon spells have to be drawn like Chinese or Japanese characters. I'm not pleased by Random House's corporate ownership, at the moment, but they published some of the best children's books of the last century. This one won't disappoint people who grew up on  Random House books.