Since we started this blog 15(!) years ago, a lot has changed. I’ve gotten married, moved from Indiana to South Carolina, bought a house, been through several pets and I have three kids. I don’t get much opportunity to talk about them here, since book blogging is serious business, but the oldest, ten, loves to read and burns through series like there’s no tomorrow. She’s currently working her way through everything Percy Jackson-adjacent, but a year ago she was just finishing up her first real literary obsession, Wings of Fire.
Wings of Fire is a little like Game of Thrones, pitched to preteens and starring (mostly) dragons. Humans--”scavengers”--pop up once in a while, usually as prey, but the dragons and their power struggle is the real draw here. The overarching narrative focuses on a power vacuum that’s been created between the seven dragon kingdoms: SkyWings, SandWings, NightWings, SeaWings, RainWings, IceWings and the MudWings. A war has been raging for years, driven largely by a quartet of power hungry and sadistic dragon queens. The antagonist of the first arc is Queen Scarlet, of the SkyWings, and we’re introduced to her when she bites a scavenger’s head off and kidnaps five young dragons, called dragonets, who have been raised since egghood by a shadowy group called Talons of Peace, who ostensibly want them to fulfill a prophecy and end the war but whose actions raise questions about their real motives. The dragonets--Tsunami, Sunny, Starflight, Glory, and our protagonist, Clay--are taken to Queen Scarlet’s kingdom where they’re imprisoned and forced to fight in gladiatorial deathmatches with other prisoners for the amusement of Queen Scarlet and her subjects. Here they meet some other dragons, including the somewhat antiheroic Peril, initially Queen Scarlet’s champion fighter and enforcer, who befriends Clay and sets into motion a dragonet love triangle that actually works pretty well.
I was surprised by the intensity Sutherland brings to the story. If the summary above sounds violent, the books themselves are even moreso. While they eschew graphic descriptions, there are face-meltings, bone shatterings, disembowelments, decapitations, and, lest you think the Game of Thrones comparison above was a joke, abrupt and brutal deaths of important characters. The story both opens and closes with a murder atop a seaside cliff, the second of which also serves to cast the Talons of Peace in a sinister light. Other plot points caught me by surprise as well. For example, the dragonets were taken as eggs and raised by members of the Talons of Peace, and one of the running plots is Clay’s sense of aloneness and his desire to return to the MudWings and find his mother and father. Near the end of the book, he succeeds in doing so, only to have his mother treat him with disdain--she hurries along his story of how he got there so she can go back to sleep--and tells him that she doesn’t know who his father is because MudWings are conceived during a giant annual orgy. Really.
I don’t want to overstate the grittiness--this is a preteen series all the way language-wise--but it does deal with some complex themes rather forthrightly, and I was surprised and happy to learn that it also features several queer dragons/relationships. The plot is satisfying, the characters, especially Peril and Glory, are compelling and well fleshed-out, and there are, like, 15 of these. So I could conceivably be reading them until this blog turns 30.
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