Dawn of the Dragons by Mari Mancusi

Title: Dawn of the Dragons

Author: Mari Mancusi

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st December 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: The dragons are coming … are you prepared? This thrilling, dystopian adventure story is perfect for fans of Wings of Fire and Impossible Creatures. Lucas isn’t having the best summer. While normally he’d be away at camp, this year he’s stuck home, watching over his younger neighbour Noah and mourning the death of his beloved cat. Even going outside is dangerous, thanks to mysterious fires making the air unsafe to breathe. Fires that Noah claims are caused by real life dragons. At first Lucas laughs it off-Noah’s dad has always been fond of conspiracy theories. But when the family suddenly flees town and strange rumours start spreading online, Lucas realises he needs to find out for sure. Meanwhile, young Cinder and her dragon herd are just trying to survive in a strange new world. They’ve found a haven high in the mountains and hope to finally live in peace. But when Cinder suffers a terrible fall, she’s not sure she’ll live long enough to see it. Searching for dragons, Lucas finds Cinder, and he can’t help but feel sorry for this tiny creature and together they begin to form an unlikely friendship. But a simple misunderstanding between scales and skin is all it takes to spark a worldwide inferno. As the dragon apocalypse looms, can Lucas and Cinder find a way to help keep their families safe?

~*~

Dragons are always popular, and I don’t think a year has gone by without me seeing a book of some sort involving dragons. Dragons have such a huge place in fantasy books of all kinds. Mari Mancusi, who has also written for the Twisted Tales series, which are a different take on Disney movies, a what if this happened. Dawn of the Dragons is a prequel to New Dragon City, so the books can be read in either order, and I hadn’t read New Dragon City yet. In Dawn of the Dragons, set in contemporary times in New York State, there are rumblings of dragons awakening. Lucas is twelve, and he has been sent home from a Boy Scouts summer camp because of the fire. Now, he’s watching his neighbour, Noah. Until Noah’s dad whisks him away amidst claims of dragons coming to the city.

It’s all a conspiracy theory, or so Lucas thinks until he finds an injured baby dragon called Cinder on the mountains. It’s a strange new world for Cinder and her dragon herd, and soon, the collision of the worlds will result in tragedy and war. A war that will change things forever, and a war that will fracture humanity and send them hurtling into an apocalypse.

Have you ever wondered if dragons really did exist? If they did, where did they go? Did they die out with the dinosaurs, or have they just been in hiding? Dawn of the Dragons does just this, positing that dragons have been hibernating since the Ice Age, so millions or thousands of years. At the very least, it’s been a very long time since the dragons have inhabited the earth. This chance meeting sets off a series of events that nobody could have predicted, where cultural and language barriers contribute to the series of events that lead to the war. It’s all too much for everyone, and the growing tensions illustrate what happens when two different cultures clash, when gestures of good faith become misunderstandings, and when everyone turns on each other. When a single decision by one person changes things forever. It’s a simple mistake that kicks things off, the mob mentality takes over. And everyone is forced to flee.

What makes this work is that it mirrors what does happen during invasions and what has happened during invasions and wars throughout history. The impacts of invasion have always been felt by people not wanting to work with the people already living in an area, wanting to enforce their way of thinking, their beliefs and their way of life, or whether, as in this books, it is a series of barriers like language and culture that impact communication. It mirrors how people throughout history have responded to invasion and the unknown. To tragedy. Wanting revenge is a human instinct, and in this novel, a dragon instinct as well. It also suggests that the feelings people have about difference, invasion or other elements that can lead to war can be very similar. That the only difference is what we don’t understand or assume. It’s a timely reminder that we need to work harder to work together against the forces that want to divide us.

The fate of the humans and the dragons, and how they might end up co-existing, rests on the shoulders of Lucas and Cinder. They’re the only ones who can communicate and shuffle messages between the humans and the dragons, so you could call them ambassadors for their communities. It’s an intriguing novel, and I think it worked well. Because it gives a good understanding of what led to New Dragon City, and having read this one first, I think it will have set things up nicely. It’s set in contemporary times, but it also doesn’t have a specific year. It does mean it could be anywhere within the last five to ten years, and into the next five years as well. It started slowly, but once things kicked off, it worked well. It cleverly used Lucas and Cinder’s perspectives throughout, alternating between the two, using first and third person to tell an effective story. It allows us to get both sides of the story, which can be something missing in conflicts like this. In a world where everyone thinks they are right, there is a sense that only having partial bits of information can affect how people understand some things. Or how we react to something. It does give a sense of attempts of two rival communities trying to work together. Of what it means to try and what could happen if things go wrong.

And it raises questions about how we do navigate huge changes in life? How do we work with changes that alter our lives forever? It’s an intriguing novel that uses dragons to examine how we might respond to our own communities changing in unpredictable ways. This is a great book, and a good way for kids and readers to see just how quickly their world can change.