The Last Dragon on Mars [Dragonships]
by Scott Reintgen
Intermediate, Middle School    Aladdin/Simon    384 pp.
10/24    9781665946513    $18.99
e-book ed.  9781665946537    $10.99

Mars-born Lunar Jones is a salvager on the dying planet, trying to find enough old technology to sell to keep his fellow orphans fed. When rival scrappers attempt to kill him to steal his latest find, he flees into the forbidden military zone and discovers a tunnel that leads to a cave containing a young dragon. The planet has been without one since humanity killed Mars’s “king-dragon,” Ares, a century before, but the dragons of Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos still drive the spaceships that cross the galaxy. A new dragon would be a game-changer for the struggling colony, and the military wants to eliminate Lunar to keep his discovery a secret. The dragon—Dread—intervenes: he has chosen the fearless Lunar as his dragoon, the point person to lead his crew and his ship. So begins Lunar’s training to captain a starship. With echoes of influences as diverse as Orson Scott Card and Anne McCaffrey, this innovative adventure effortlessly draws readers into Lunar’s predicament. The story line provides a rich ground for interpersonal rivalries and loyalties among the other candidates for dragoon, while the action builds realistically from training exercises to real-life emergencies as the dragons’ political conflicts become deadly. The pages turn so quickly that readers will get to the end almost without realizing it—then wait eagerly for a sequel.

From the ">January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.