To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose (published in 2023 by Del Rey) is the first book of the Nampeshiweisit. It has been nominated for the Libby Award for Best Fantasy (2023), the Andre Norton Award (2024), the Lodestar Award for Best YA Book (2024), and Moniquill Blackgoose has been nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (2024). And the hype is real. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is my new favorite dragon book, hands down, and I really like dragon books.
So, what’s it about?
When Anequs, a young indigenous woman whose homeland has been colonized by the Anglish, is chosen by a newly hatched dragon, she must leave her remote island to attend an academy for dragoneers or else risk the Anglish killing her dragon as feral. Anequs must navigate an Anglish school, despite having no formal education, and she must learn their ways and traditions without losing her own. Above all, she must learn to shape her dragon’s breath to prevent disaster. This is a story of cultures clashing, colonial oppression, and indigenous pride. It is also a story about a teenage girl going to a dragon riding academy and the friends and enemies she makes along the way. If you’re looking for a replacement magic academy book for the beloved series authored by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, this might be a good fit, and unlike that series, Blackgoose avoids perpetuating harmful stereotypes to the best of my knowledge.
I thought Moniquill Blackgoose handled the balance between the intensity of the oppression of indigenous peoples by colonial powers with the joy and wonder of a world with dragons adeptly.
Dragons, dragons everywhere
If you’re a fan of all the varieties of dragons from How to Train Your Dragon, you’ll be pleased to know that Blackgoose takes a similar approach in To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. Blackgoose differentiates between breeds of dragons as bread by the Anglish, wild dragons, feral dragons, and the breeds of dragons native to the lands of Anequs’s people.
And the dragon descriptions, they are exquisite. These dragons are feathered and quilled and are much more animal-like than the larger-than-life mythical beasts that are stereotypical of the genre. They do not speak, although they do have a connection with their companion humans that allows them to communicate through emotions, which I thought was really cool.
It was also refreshing to read a book about dragons that was set in a non-medieval, non-European/non-East Asian setting. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is set in a world that I can only describe as if the Vikings had colonized North America instead of the British, French, and Spanish. As for the time period, it’s around the time of westward expansion prior to the American Civil War, if we’re drawing parallels between a fictional world with its own history and our own. So, not only is this a dragon book, but it’s also steampunk, with fantastical machines powered with batteries made using materials transmuted with dragon’s breath.
This brings me to another awesome feature of the book: the dragons’ breath can be used to transform materials into different things. Part of the reason Anequs must leave her home to attend school is because her people lost their dragons long ago and, with them, the knowledge of how to use dragon’s breath for transmutation. She must learn chemical formulas and symbols in order to properly guide her dragon’s breath. If she isn’t able to learn how to do this at best she will never be able to leave the school again and be forced to remain a ward of the headmistress. At worst, her dragon will be taken from her and killed, which she will not abide for dragons are sacred to her people.
As the story progresses, Anequs uncovers some of the knowledge her people had about dragons. I really appreciated how Blackgoose showed each culture’s different approaches to relating to and using dragons. Truly excellent worldbuilding.
A diverse cast
It would have been easy for Blackgoose to simply throw an indigenous protagonist into a sea of white folks. That would still have been more diversity than is present in many books. But that’s not what Blackgoose did.
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath features diversity across race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and neurotype. One of the things I appreciated most about the story was how people with marginalized identities found each other and supported one another. I especially liked Anequs’s friendship with a boy who is clearly coded as autistic.
While the portrayal of autism occasionally relied on stereotypes (especially since the character’s strengths lay in math and science, which is not true of all autistic people), Blackgoose took a more nuanced approach than I’ve seen in many books. The autistic character was never used for comedic effect, and I could tell that Blackgoose endeavored to make readers empathize with the autistic experience rather than deride it. I can’t say whether it was successful for non-autistic readers, but for my part as an autistic person, I recognized aspects of my own experience in the character.
In addition to autistic representation, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath also had good LGBTQ+ representation, portrayed a variety of cultures and religious beliefs, and, despite the fact that Anequs was attending a school for elite white dragon riders, centered the experiences of non-white, working-class people.
Why have a love triangle when you can have a throuple?
One of the things that always frustrated me about reading YA growing up is that the female protagonists were always stuck between two equally-toxic-but-in-different-ways, male love interests. Recently, there’s been a bit of a shift away from that, but one of my favorite ways that this YA trope has been disrupted is by introducing polyamorous relationships into the mix. I saw it in Xiran Jay Zhao’s excellent Iron Widow, and again in To Shape a Dragon’s Breath.
Anequs is open about being bisexual, and she comes from a culture where that is normal and accepted, just as it is normal for people to take multiple partners if everyone agrees. So when Anequs finds herself attracted to Theod – the only other indigenous student at the school – and Liberty – a black laundry maid working to pay off her indenture – she actively pursues both relationships. And I found not only her “why choose, when I can have both” attitude refreshing, but I also appreciated that she was an active participant in her own romantic life. So often, I read books where the female lead just seems to be waiting for the two male leads to duke it out without expressing much opinion one way or the other, and such wishy-washyness drives me up the wall. It’s there romantic life, they should make a choice.
An immersive experience
One of the things that I thought was brilliantly done in To Shape a Dragon’s Breath was the fact that Blackgoose used a constructed language for the names of chemical elements. It would have been easy to use the English names, but by presenting the elements in a language foreign to both the reader and the protagonist, Blackgoose allowed the reader to feel just as out of their depth as Anequs. Some readers may find this off-putting, but I really liked it.
I also liked that Blackgoose didn’t just gloss over the contents of the books Anequs read and the lectures she attended. We got big chunks of book excerpts and, in some cases, full lectures on alchemy. Again, maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but definitely mine.
Characters you love to hate
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath deals heavily with themes of racism, which means we have some truly despicable racists to hate. We also got a variety of racists, from the cartoonish “let’s kill all the indigenous people for the crime of simply existing” to the more subtle, supposed allies of Anequs’s people. These are white people who want to help the indigenous people by “civilizing” them through exposure to “polite society.” Their approach to racism is to infantilize Anequs by assuming that because she comes from a different culture, she is somehow stupid, childish, and wants to “become” Anglish. A misconception that Anequs is quick to disabuse them of. As much as I loved yelling at the cartoonish racists aloud while reading this book, I appreciated the nuance with which Blackgloose approached racism’s many forms. Even well-meaning people can cause harm when they’re trying to “help.”
We are also gifted with some very ableist characters, namely, the autistic boy’s mother, who forces him to adhere to the norms of polite society and then sends him to his room when he inevitably has a meltdown from overstimulation. She’s a fun character to hate. I definitely yelled at her.
All the stars
I give this book a rating of every star in the universe. It’s the kind of book that I wish I’d been able to read when I was its target age-range. It’s got dragons, politics, steampunk, an intelligent female character who knows who she is and doesn’t let other people shape her into their ideas of who she should be. It’s got a hard magic system and highlights some hard realities from our own world within a fantasy world. It’s got a diverse cast of characters and doesn’t fall into a traditional YA love triangle trope. In fact, it doesn’t even follow a traditional narrative structure. I think some of that is owing to the fact that To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is the first book in a series that appears to follow a single narrative rather than have each book follow their own isolated narratives.
So if you like books that break the mold and challenge you to think about difficult realities while simultaneously giving you dragons and fun machines, what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and go read To Shape a Dragon’s Breath.
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