Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

This is book #11 in a row with 'Dragon' in the title. My Kindle randomly decided to alphabetize my books, and I noticed I had more with 'Dragon' in the title than any other word, so I decided to knock them all out. I might do books with pictures of dragons on their covers next. It's kind of fun sticking with a theme.

Secret of the Dragon Egg (Dragon Riders of Avria) by N. A. Davenport. What a good book! And even more surprising, it was self published! I never would have guessed (the editing was perfect and the writing was pretty darned good!).

Though this was a YA book, the worldbuilding was really satisfying. Set on modern day Earth, there is a large island that's blocked off behind some magical barrier. Rarely (once every couple generations), an outsider ends up on the island. The main character (Will) and his parents were in a shipwreck and ended up washed up on the island's shores.

Will's life there isn't so bad. He has a way with animals, so a town "elder" (one of the richest, most powerful men in the area) puts him to work in a stable (for large birds which fill the role of horses in that world). His parents don't end up anywhere near as well. The father has to work all day in the fields (which oddly he doesn't seem to mind so much), but the mother has to work in the house and does back-breaking manual labor from sunrise to sunset. Cleaning laundry by hand, etc (the island world has no technology at all). The adults' lives seem really bad, and the whole family basically ends up as indentured servants to the elder (a common thing in that world).

Dragons exist on that island, and anyone who finds an egg (or helps find one, sometimes whole teams look for eggs) earn the right to stand on the hatching grounds when the year's batch hatches to see if one of the baby dragons will bond to them.

By chance Will finds an egg. (There was some drama at this point where the town bully steals the egg. I kind of skimmed over that part.)

The only small issue I had was that it felt like Will's age changed through the book. For the first third, it seemed like he was maybe 10 years old, then suddenly he seemed like an older teenager, then by the end of the book it came out he was 15-ish. Not a really big deal, just a little confusing.

The other confusing thing is the order of this series. Most of Google says this is a two book series, with this being the first book. There's a third book of this series though, published before the other two... Whatever the order was supposed to be, this felt like the first book of the series. I have the other two books, I'm going to read them next.