Unfortunately for my less patient partner, our evening storytimes at home have generally revolved around young adult fantasy fiction. At the library, it's all I can do to get our 11-year-old son Stewart to look at something without some kind of wizard, or collection of mythical symbols and imagery on the cover. And he's utterly indiscriminate when it comes to books about dragons. And frankly, there's just so many dragon books that not only is it hard for me to stay interested in the stories, but the quality of those stories and of the writing is often wildy uneven.

One of my biggest gripes is that these books' authors seem to know that there are kids out there, like my kid, who will read and even enjoy their books for no other reason than they're about dragons (the same way I will listen to and enjoy the very worst synth-pop the 80s had to offer simply because it's 80s synth-pop). Their books are often overlong and ill-defined, padding weak plots with bits of esoteric dragon trivia that may actually have some basis in real folklore, but more often seems to have colorectal origins.

Then again, sometimes our son's apparently monomaniacal approach to book selection yields a treasure. For instance, we recently discovered the Chinese-American young adult novelist Lawrence Yep through his acclaimed 1975 book Dragonwings. Though the title of the book suggested "about dragons" to our son, the book was actually a vivid, engaging historical fiction about how a relationship between a Chinese-American father and his recently emigrated son grows through the father's dream of building a flying machine. Though dragons themselves were only tangential to the plot, the compact, but highly detailed and emotionally gripping story had us both in thrall, and, for the first time I've ever seen (though admittedly, I've only been his dad for less than a year), Stew made his next trip to the library with a specific author in mind.

Luckily for us, Mr. Yep has not only been quite prolific in his 30-plus year career, but also quite diverse. In addition to many stand-alone novels, some historical, some present-day, he has also developed a handful of series, including his ongoing historical epic Golden Mountain Chronicles (of which Dragonwings is part), and a four-book fantasy series called Dragon of the Lost Sea, the eponymous first book of which Stew and I just recently finished reading. And true to our previous experience with Yep's work, his 1982 novel Dragon of the Lost Sea is wonderful.

- - - - -
The story at the center of Dragon of the Lost Sea is a familiar one. It's a story that, even in my just-getting-started journey as a dragon book reader, I've encountered in different forms three or four times already. After the assassination of her mother, the subsequent betrayals of her brother, and the dispersal of her clan at the hands of the evil witch Civet, the disgraced dragon princess Shimmer has been a solitary wanderer, searching for a way to reclaim her royal mantle, while dreaming of revenge against Civet, who has stolen the dragon clan's sea and wears it around her neck inside a blue pearl.

Shimmer has learned not to trust, not to get close, not to take or offer help from anyone - least of all, humans. Until one day, while following the scent of Civet's dangerous magic, she meets a kitchen servant boy called Thorn, whose distrust of the humans who beat and abuse him matches Shimmer's, but whose belief not only in such things as dragons and witches, and indeed, his own power and ability as a mere human boy ultimately earns the boy a lift (via dragon flight) away from his village to a "better place", wherever that might be. But when Thorn learns of Shimmer's mission, he insists on being more than a mere hitchhiker, and determines to prove himself to the arrogant, even in her disgrace, Shimmer.

This is not just a good story, but, in Yep's telling of it, a resonant one - a story anchored in (though not bound to) Chinese myth and history that even, especially during a confrontation with Civet in which our heroes come to understand the root of their enemy's evil, suggests (without sledgehammering) both environmental and political allegory. It's hard not to be reminded of the devastation we've seen this hurricane season when, in an act of desperate anger, Civet unleashes the dragon's sea from the blue pearl around her neck and floods a beloved trading village.

But, still, the heart of this story is really about two experience-bruised souls learning to trust, to care about, and care for each other; learning to make mistakes and forgive themselves and each other for them, and learn from them; learning to confront their separate, difficult pasts, and to forge a single new path into the future together, recognizing the challenges that will face them, but going on undaunted, sure of each other. It's a story that echoes my family's journey to adoption in ways that caught me off guard, and had me well choked up at times. As such, I'd recommend it specifically to any adoptive family - but also to anyone who just loves a good dragon story. With Dragon of the Lost Sea, Yep demonstrates that the best dragon stories aren't necessarily about dragons at all.

- - - - -
MORE LAWRENCE YEP:

Dragonwings (1975)


Recommended: Yes