Years 7-8 will enjoy this easily read fantasy, turn the pages with the action and absorb a good introduction to one of the pillars of Asian culture. As usual, the dragons are totally believable and fascinating, especially with the conceit of Kai’s adolescent mood swings. I enjoyed Wilkinson’s closely woven carpet of a story in which the violence of the nomads, the magical powers of the dragons and the pacific precepts of the Buddhists are kept in constantly interesting patterns of action. Enter, from the ruined cellars and cisterns of the city a twelve year old girl, Pema who rescues them from the nomad attack and is bent on a very un-Buddhist revenge. He has chosen Tao to be his dragon keeper but at first they cannot talk to each other and Tao, being a novice in a remote monastery, has no social skills. The Dragonkeeper series has been extraordinarily successful both in Australia and internationally. Once again I enjoy Wilkinson’s research and her convincing historical setting which now supports the story of the Buddhist period in which Tao sees a statue of the Buddha for the first time, is appalled by the un-Buddhist behaviour of a charlatan Abbot who wants to build a golden pagoda and get the support of the barbarian leader.Īnd of course, there are dragons, especially Kai, who at 466 years old is in a petulant, adolescent stage. They continued the dangerous journey together while bands of barbarians roamed the country.Ĭarole Wilkinson realised that dragons live a very long time, so she wrote this story in an era of turbulent history in China. The dragon started talking to Tao in his mind. He met a girl called Pema who he shouldn’t have spent time with. Tao had never broken the precepts before and although he tried not to, he lost his cloth for sieving water, so it was pure. Tao knew this boy was a dragon in disguise. The silent boy, was sent to travel with him. Tao didn’t expect people there to be able to share food with him. The Abbott sent Tao to collect Alms in the city of Luoyang, the city that had been raided and burnt to the ground. Food is scarce, and she must constantly be on the lookout for enemies. Tao realised the dragon was injured an he could help heal the creature. The wise dragon, Danzi, is no longer around to guide her, and now it is up to Ping to take care of the baby dragon, Kai. That’s when the other boy shimmered and changed shape, he became a green dragon. The powerful Han Dynasty is a distant memory and tribes of barbarian soldiers fight over what was once the Empire. He tried to usher the boy away as he couldn’t go inside the holy place. While running to complete his tasks after having slept in Tao ran into a boy monk about his age in old fashioned clothes. All this quiet and contemplative life was to earn him good Karma to bestow on his brother, who’m he hoped would be cured of a malady that he’d suffered from birth. His other privileges included lessons in Sanskrit by the old monk Lao Chen. He was attentive to his duties, including transcribing the sutra, the Vinaya are rules that the Buddha had set down. Tao is a novice monk, he’s the abbots favourite in the small Yinmi Monastry that sat hidden in mist high in the mountains.
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