Title: Dragonkeeper
Author: Carole Wilkinson
Type of text: Historical/fantasy
This is a good novel about a young girl called Ping, who is sold to her master Lan as a slave. She is treated cruelly and the only friend that she has is a rat. She can only count to ten. But there are two dragons that she is responsible for. When one dragon dies, Lan blames it on her. So the other dragon takes her out of her captivity and into the outside.
They want to reach the ocean. The dragon is carrying a stone, which is really an egg. They travel a long way through the kingdom and after a long time, they finally reach the ocean. In their journey, they run into lots of friends and enemies, but they prevail in the end.
This is the first book in the Dragonkeeper trilogy, and the other books in the series are Garden of the Purple Dragon and Dragon Moon.
This book has also won awards including 2004 shortlisted, the children's book council of Australia shortlisted and Aurealis award winner.
A part that I liked was when Ping is served turtle stew but thinks that it's a turtle because of the shell covering it, when the shell was removed by a servant, she finally knew that it was not a turtle, but turtle stew. This is based on when Carole Wilkinson was also served turtle stew, and she was still figuring out how to eat it.
Carole has done ten years of research on Chinese history and dragons to be able to write this book. If you want to read more of her books then I recommend her Ramose series.
Overall, this is a fun to read book that keeps you interested until you finish it.
I rate this a 4.5/5
