The Fire Within By Chris D'Lacey

Description:

  David expects a quiet family when he decides to lodge with the Pennykettles, but instead he meets Mrs. Liz Pennykettle and her hyper daughter, Lucy. Liz has a hobby of making clay dragons and she and Lucy always talk about the dragon's fire inside of them. David gets a special dragon from Liz named Gadzooks.

  Lucy is in love with squirrels and tells David all about her animal friends. One is named Conker and he has lost one eye. David and Lucy try to save the poor squirrel by catching him, but they have to beat their neighbor, Mr.Bacon, at this game. Mr. Bacon hates little critters that pull up his plants and he will do anything to stop them. Even if he has to kill them.

  David starts to write a story about the squirrels for Lucy's birthday with the help of his dragon, Gadzooks. He also learns the secrets of the clay dragons along the way and the fire within.

After tons and tons of people telling me to read this book, I have finally gotten around to it. And as I was reading it, people still come over and say, "You're reading that? It's great." So here's what I think.

  First off, the writing quality is BEAUTIFUL! 

  In David's story that he wrote, the writing is flowery and waaaay too descriptive. He uses too many big words and makes it sound like he's writing a poem. 

  The characters are so well developed. They all have unique personalities.  This book is full of imagination, how Lucy names the squirrels and it seems like they can talk to each other. Also the dragons. Oh, those dragons. They are so mysterious. Only Liz and Lucy know about the secrets until the very last chapter where David finally figures it out.  

  I feel like most of the book was about the squirrels and left the dragons out for such a long time. David didn't really seem to be bothered by not knowing about the dragon's secrets until the very end. I on the other hand, would have been very bothered that the Pennykettles were hiding something from me. You could tell that they were keeping something from the very beginning, because Liz kept cutting Lucy off like she was going sat something wrong.

Overall this is a great book and I am totally willing to read it again and I'll definitely read the next books in the series. This book is best for 10-14 year-olds who love a story that contains a small amount of magic. I give it 4/5 stars.