Hana the Thunder Dragon (Dragon Girls #13) by Maddy Mara

Title: Hana the Thunder Dragon (Dragon Girls #13)

Author: Maddy Mara

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st March 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 144

Price: $14.99

Synopsis: Hana, her twin sister, Mina, and their cousin Zora are the best of friends. Now they share something more than a fierce family bond: The three are also Storm Dragons! As the Thunder Dragon, Hana has a roar louder than any storm. She’ll need all her powerful abilities to confront the Magic Forest’s newest villain, the Chaos Queen. The queen is creating dangerous weather that only the Storm Dragons can defeat!

~*~

Hana, her twin sister, Mina, and their cousin Zora are getting ready for their grandmother’s eightieth birthday. They’re playing together and avoiding getting ready when they’re whisked away to the Magic Forest to confront the Chaos Queen – but they’ll need a little help from Beebi and some disgruntled, grizzling bears to fix the Thunder Maker.

Hana, Mina, and Zora are the Storm Dragons, the newest three members of the Dragon Girls crew. This is their first adventure and quest – and facing the Chaos Queen and her Chaos Critters is fun, scary, and new. The girls are ow on a quest to stop the dangerous weather. Whilst this is part of a series, it also begins the next set of dragons – the Storm Dragons. Each set has three books in it, and Hana the Thunder Dragon starts this one.

The adventure is aimed at readers aged seven and over, and captures the fun and whimsy of dragons, what a quest is, and the value of teamwork and problem solving. The villain is appropriately scary for younger readers – not too scary, but also has the right amount of scariness and badness for young readers to want Hana, her sister, and her cousin to defeat her and fix the Thunder Maker, to help fix the weather. Dragons are always fun – and they are in so many books, in many different ways that there will always be a new or different way to use them in books – like having Hana, Mina, and Zora become dragons to complete their quest.

And quests are always part of fantasy stories, books, and movies. This is a great way to get kids interested in quests or show them how they work, without being too complicated or layered like many fantasy stories do. The quest is contained within the novel, and works to set up what is to come as well.. What I liked about this was that I could dive into the book without having read the previous twelve, because I got the sense that each three-book set is its own individual arc within the same world – what a fun series. I think readers aged seven to eight and older will love this series if dragons are their thing, and enjoy seeing girls being brave and amazing, and not being damsels in distress. Girl power is awesome, especially when it is in the form of dragons.

This was a fun book, and I love seeing the different ways dragons are used in fiction for all ages.