Dragons and world-slip, two standard ingredients in fantasy novels!  Slip into another world, encounter a dragon, discover new magical abilities you never knew you had, and there is your adventure. 

But give it a twist like Dragon Fire and it becomes much more than just another formula story.  Dragon Fire is actually the re-release of three novels Jet Smoke and Dragon Fire, Into the Spiral and The Shining Bridge, but the story flows so smoothly from one to the next that it reads easily as a single book. 

The twist is dreaming.  It is clear that all through the story someone or something is dreaming.  But, as the reader moves between the two worlds (the magic one and ours, well, maybe) with the characters, it is never clear which is the dream. 

The dragon certainly dreams and the worlds are part of its dream.  But are the characters in one world dreaming the dragon and therefore the other world?  Or is the dragon actually dreaming them and therefore the world and therefore …. ? 

And what happens when they wake the dragon up and it gets grumpy? 

Sparrow is a boy from the magic world who earns the gift of some powers but soon learns that they come with responsibility.  Kittel is a girl from “our” world, stuck in the magic one after the dragon makes her plane crash, who is trying to reach her sister, Trina. 

Together they must explore this whole riddle of the dreams and how they are linked. Each of the three sections introduces a new step towards sorting out who is what, with Sparrow and Kittel piecing together a worlds-wide jumble of clues. 

They have assistance - Puckel, a grumpy sorcerer (who knows more about the worlds than he lets on), his stick (which keeps changing to a snake, or the children's teacher, or a gate between places), friends and family in both worlds - but Sparrow, Kittel and Trina must make the decisions and choices.

No great swords’n’sorcery in this fantasy adventure, but Dragon Fire is intriguing and exciting just trying to work out where you are!

Review by David Beagley

© 2004 David Beagley