Dragons of Darkness »

Antonia Michaelis has lived and taught in India. She is the author of several award-winning books published in her native Germany, where she lives. Anthea Bell is the translator of Cornelia Funke’s bestselling Inkheart books. Her work has won the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Great Britain.

The author-translator team behind the internationally acclaimed Tiger Moon reunites for this lush, exotic tale of fantasy and adventure—and dragons galore.

In this thrilling modern-day fable, two boys from very different backgrounds are thrown together by magic, mayhem, and a common foe. Jumar, an invisible prince, wants to free his native Nepal from invaders. Christopher, a shy German boy, wants to find his kidnapped brother. Together they embark on a journey through the wilderness of Nepal—a journey that proves to be a dangerous rite of passage. Fighting the beautiful but deadly dragons that beset the country, the two boys learn that in order to change the world, they must first change themselves.

Publishers Weekly

Michaelis (Tiger Moon) recasts modern-day Nepal as a dragon-infested fantasy kingdom, divided between a cruel and cynical military and idealistic but equally cruel Maoist guerrillas. Nepal’s king is too wrapped up in his own problems to provide the necessary leadership, and neither of the armed factions is able to do anything about the plague of dragons drinking the color from the countryside and turning its peasants into bronze statues. Nepal’s salvation falls to three 14-year-olds: Christopher, a German teenager transported through mysterious means to Nepal; Jumar, Nepal’s (literally) invisible crown prince; and brave Niya, who is in the service of the Maoists. The trio strives to unravel the occult mysteries behind Jumar’s curse, find Christopher’s missing brother, and rescue the country from the dragons and a bloody civil war. Although the fast-paced and well-constructed story is marred somewhat by mustache-twirling villains and the author’s decision to imbue real-world conflicts with a layer of fantasy, Michaelis’s characters are engaging (despite Jumar’s truly remarkable ability to walk into traps) and the romance between Niya and Christopher is touching and bittersweet. Ages 12–up. (Jan.)