Ember and the Ice Dragons (Heather Fawcett)

Ember and the Ice Dragons
Heather Fawcett
Storytide
Fiction, MG Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: In a Victorian London that never was, the Stormancer Lionel St. George - a powerful, if not always perfect, Magician at Chesterfield University - is raising a most unusual daughter... a girl who is not a girl at all. Twelve years ago, he was chasing a magical storm through the high Welsh mountains when he found the bodies of two fire dragons, possibly the last of their kind in the wild, which had been slaughtered for their powerful fireglass scales. With them was a newborn baby dragon still clinging to life, and Lionel, unable to leave the thing to die or, worse, slaughter it, used his imperfect magics to wrap a concealment around the foundling, making her appear as a baby human girl (except for the wings; he had to use invisibility to hide those). But now that she's growing up, Ember's innate fire magic is leaking out of her disguise with spontaneous, uncontrolled eruptions of flame. Even in an university full of Magicians, fire has a way of being noticed. Until Lionel can work out how to fix the problem, he has little choice but to send her away - all the way to Antarctica, where his estranged Scientist sister Myra studies the wildlife of the icy land. Ember doesn't want to go, but she knows she has no choice if she wants to avoid being found out.
Whatever she expected to find in Antarctica, she didn't expect to find dragons.
Aunt Myra, it turns out, isn't just studying penguins; she and her fellow scientists are working to save the last surviving wild dragons in the world, magnificent pale creatures known as ice dragons, from the annual Winterglass Hunt. Every year, nobles and bounty hunters take down as many beasts as they can for their invaluable winterglass scales, and every year the population is plummeting, until soon they might go the way of the fire dragons. Ember may not have been able to save her parents, but she's not about to let a pack of ignorant brutes destroy what may be her last living kin - even if it risks exposing her secret to the world.

REVIEW: The fact that this title lingered so long in my "Currently Reading" list should not at all be construed as a reflection on the story itself; it was more about everything else in my life (and the world in general) going wrong. Ember and the Ice Dragons itself is an enjoyable middle-grade fantasy adventure, with dragons and magic (and a little science) and a heroine who could probably carry another book or two if she got the chance.
Having been in human form since her earliest days, Ember has no recollection of what it means to be a real, dragon-shaped dragon, for all that she still is not entirely human: she cannot tell a lie, for one thing, plus there are some times when human psychology just confuses her. Still, she loves her "father" Lionel dearly, and he loves her, which makes it that much harder when she has to go away for both of their safety; the spells he worked to conceal her are in a blurry legal area at the very least, and his position as a university professor is already precarious enough with his other occasional mishaps, not to mention being on the wrong side of university politics more often than not. In Antarctica, she's on her own for the first time - Aunt Myra, though aware of who and what Ember is, is not a motherly type, and isn't quite sure how to deal with the sudden imposition - and also among "peers", or at least human children of her own age. She struggles to relate, finding herself on the wrong end of a pair of bullies (and the wrong end of the first teacher who isn't Lionel she's ever had to deal with; the idea that she's expected to study the same things in the same way as everyone else, to do homework, is irritating and confusing), complicated by her continued worries about more spontaneous combustions. The discovery that there are ice dragons on the continent brings an unexpected thrill of joy; they may not be fire dragons, but they are still dragons. Almost immediately, though, that hope turns to fear and rage when she meets the arrogant young Prince Gideon and his father, both of whom are active proponents of dragon hunting and bristle at how Queen Victoria has limited the dragon hunts and may even eventually side with the Scientists and end the practice altogether. Gideon's reasons for becoming a dragon hunter are a little more complicated than Ember first realizes, though; the friction between power and politics and conservation is not always as clean and easy as Ember first thinks. There are also secrets in the Antarctic wilderness that neither the Scientists nor the hunters don't fully understand, secrets that could endanger everyone. When Ember sets out to sabotage the hunt - with some help from two human friends - she runs straight into those secrets, and almost pays with her life. Still, for all that she stumbles at times, she does learn along the way.
While the plot moves fairly well, there are a few thin patches. The alternate history Fawcett builds feels scattershot and thin if you look too hard, and a few characters felt like they were left halfway through their own stories by the end, with certain elements weirdly forgotten or petering out after much foreshadowing and development. (I suspect that there was a planned sequel at the very least, if not a full series.) Other than that, it's a decent story that has both humor and wonder, not without a few perilous and darker moments, and I enjoyed the main character and, of course, the dragons.

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