The Great Texas Dragon Race (Kacy Ritter)

The Great Texas Dragon Race
Kacy Ritter
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Adventure/Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: For all thirteen years of her life, Cassidy Drake has loved three things: her family, her home state of Texas, and dragons. She grew up on her parents' sanctuary for the beasts, who are too often misunderstood, hunted, or - even worse - abused and exploited, particularly by the world's energy corporations. Many of the rescues on the Drake ranch were former "workers" for FireCorp, the biggest company and the one with the worst reputation for how they treat dragons, for all that their public relations people sweep it under the rug. Corporate money keeps buying up small ranches and sanctuaries, but her father has held out... only now bills are piling up faster than donations are coming in. When Grandma falls ill, that may be the last financial straw on the sanctuary's back - unless Cassidy can pull off a miracle.
Like her mother before her, Cassidy is a talented rider, tamer, and racer. She has the stats to enter the biggest challenge in the state: the Great Texas Dragon Race. Part speed race, part endurance trial, part scavenger hunt, the Race draws competitors from across the country, with a prize purse big enough to end the Drake ranch's financial problems for years... only, ever since Cassidy's mother died from a venomous dragon's bite, her father's been reluctant to let her take risks, not even for the good of the family and their dragons. Besides, the winners are almost always the corporate sponsored riders, with the best training and the best equipment, not outsiders - and especially not outsiders riding scarred, undersized dragons like her favorite mount Ranga. But Cassidy Drake doesn't see another choice, and she's never backed down from a challenge - not even a challenge that has claimed the lives of far more experienced dragon riders, with far more experienced dragons.

REVIEW: This is far from the first story to riff on the classic "underdog girl and her overlooked horse" formula with fantastic creatures and wild competitions. The alternate Earth it creates, with various sizes and species of wild dragons alongside mundane critters, also isn't a first, and in this case is probably best not poked at too hard for plausibility holes. But The Great Texas Dragon Race does present a decent, high-energy story with a protagonist who isn't flawless, in a world that isn't as morally black and white as she first imagined... and it has dragons, who may be only a step or two removed from "scaly puppy" or "scaly pony" territory (where dragons are just bigger, scalier, and more incendiary pets/companions/mounts), but still make for some nice peril and adventure.
From the start, Cassidy Drake is a bold personality, more at home in the saddle of a dragon than anywhere else. She already dreams of entering the big Race, both because of her inherent competitive nature and because her late mother Aurora was once a victor, and much of Cassidy's young life has been spent trying to live up to Mom's reputation (spurred in part by grief and childhood guilt; she was there when Aurora was struck by a venomous wild drake, but was too young and scared to get help). She has less than a week to convince her father, though, and he's stubbornly overprotective of her. When an executive of FireCorp starts poking around the ranch, she's initially confident that, once again, the Drakes will keep the wolves at bay and protect their many charges... but when her beloved grandmother, the glue that holds their little family together, falls suddenly ill and needs expensive testing and treatment, the girl only grows more determined (aided and abetted by Grandma, who believes in the girl more than she even believes in herself). There's a touch of plot convenience here and there to even get her, a late entrant, into the race to begin with, but once she's there she has to find her own way through and fight her own battles - and fail, more than once. She resists making alliances or friends among other competitors; eventually there can be only one winner, but the early stages at least can go easier with a little help, or at least knowing that not everyone else is actively looking to stick a knife in her back. Plus the FireCorp sponsored riders are clearly working together from the beginning, leaving those without corporate backers at a disadvantage right out of the gate if they can't pull together. Worse, one of the FireCorp riders, a boy named Ash, keeps trying to befriend her - and letting her guard down once almost costs her everything. But there's more to his story than she knows, just as there's more to the other racers and the Race itself than she knows, and one of the many things Cassidy has to learn is to listen now and again. This is a whole different league than the regional races she and Ranga have run, and Cassidy is in over her head for some time before she learns to tread water, let alone swim. Along the way, she has to re-evaluate just what she stands for and why she's competing, and whether victory should be something more than just a prize purse at the end.
More than once, there's a sense of other characters existing to help or hinder the main character specifically (particularly most of the "baddies" in the FireCorp riding group). As mentioned previously, there are also some issues of plausibility if one looks too closely or too critically at the world in general and the race in particular; the often-potentially-deadly nature of the challenges feel like something one would find in a Harry Potter world where wizards with magic are not far away and can potentially bespell an antagonized wild dragon in an emergency (or can at least possibly magick up a cure to critical injuries inflicted along the way) or in a more dystopian place like Panem from The Hunger Games, where the amped-up spectacle and deadly nature of the competition is the point, not in a world that's more or less our own but with dragons. But on the whole the story doesn't slow down enough for too much introspection or examination, and Cassidy's a bold enough personality, undertaking a wild enough adventure, to generally make things work, especially for the target audience.

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