We home educate 3 children. When I first read The Secret Dragon, the kids were 7 years and 5 year old twins. We struggle (big time!) to find enough books to devour. The kids love reading, and they especially love Mummy to read chapters of books every day. I kid you not! When we find a good one, we want to celebrate and share it with the world!
The Secret Dragon book by Ed Clarke was one of the first decent books we had read in a while. I stumbled across it as it was shortlisted for the Tir na n-Og award, and it was about dragons. My kids had shown an interest in dragons and other books didn’t seem very engaging for them. This book was so exciting for me to read to the kids. They really enjoyed it, as did I. The great news is that if you love it as much as we did, there is a sequel called Summer of the Dragons, which was equally engaging for us. And Ed Clarke also did two other brilliant stories called Rowan Oakwing (also known as A Fairy’s Tale) and Rowan Oakwing Night Of The Fox (also published as A Fairy’s Courage). I’ll do a review on the Oakwing collection soon too, as they are also worthy of being in our favourite book listings.
The Secret Dragon
A brief synopsis of this book is that a girl uncovers a dragon egg whilst fossil hunting. The egg cracks open and she now has a live dragon to take care of. She’s never been very good at taking care of living creatures but has to work to keep a new species hidden, as well as keep it alive and safe. There is an evil character in this book called Griff, who desperately wants to get the dragon for his own gain. The girl has to find ways to protect the dragon from Griff too, making this an exciting adventure to read.
Possible Themes To Consider Before Reading To Kids
In a similar way to so many of the current brilliant young children books at the moment, this book mentions the death of the girl’s father and one her friend’s mothers. In a similar way to my worry about the dead parent story theme in Hannah Gold’s The Last Bear and Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers, I was a bit concerned if too much reference to a parent having died would cause my kids alarm. I guess because the story is talking about someone else’s parent, all of these amazing stories’ references to parental death doesn’t seem to be affecting my kids.
As a side note, Amazon’s recommended reading age is for 8-12, so this is presumably due to some of the content potentially being a bit strong for nearly 6 year olds and an 8 year old. However, my kids absolutely loved this story, and I am sure if any of the content wasn’t suitable for my kids I would have ‘er hem, where was I, ermmmm…’ skipped over those parts! I can’t remember details if there were parts like that in this book, and all I remember is that this was a fantastic read for my kids.
Why I Liked The Secret Dragon, As A Mother of 3 Young Kids
This story was gripping throughout. I had never heard of Ed Clarke before reading it but we had been searching for a good author since most of the award-winning ‘best selling’ kids books were frankly horrendous for my kids. This was perfect for our family. I loved watching the kids play out Ed Clarke’s storyline through their play acting, being baby dragons with the unique sounds, and getting our (lovely) neighbour to be the evil Dr Griff. I enjoyed seeing them build nests and collect dragon eggs, with the main photo of this blog post being one of the dragon’s nests.
Why My Kids Liked The Secret Dragon
My kids clearly adored the whole of this story. Both The Secret Dragon and Summer Of The Dragons books sparked some fun and engaging imaginary play. They made dragon’s nests with dragon (stone) eggs and even found a teddy dragon in the charity shop to be Gweeb. They pretended they were dragons and their play looked so much fun. It was a very engaging time for them, and also opened up their minds to the possibility of there being species on this earth or elsewhere that we have no clue exist yet. I don’t think they’ve ever played out a book so much as this one, so it was clearly inspirational for them.
I first read these books aloud to the kids in August 2024, but they have read the stories again themselves since. They also asked me to start reading The Secret Dragon again the other day, which sparked me to include this as a highly worthy read in these book reviews. We highly recommend this book and would happily read it again and again!
Gentle Parent 