Buried Fire

#154
Title: Buried Fire
Author: Jonathan Stroud
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2004
333 pages
I'm sorry to say that, other than trolling for short stories in anthologies, I've exhausted all of Jonathan Stroud's U.S.-available works. Like Garth Nix, Stroud writes young adult fantasy young adult horror underpinnings. Buried Fire is no exception. Overtly a story about dragons and the powers they bestow, it quickly reveals its preoccupation with the unspoken underside--under ground, lost in history, evil, and unconscious. the protagonist, Michael, is as problematic as the protagonist of the Bartimaeus Trilogy; that is, he's an adolescent. Less subtle but more complex than The Leap, it is most similar to The Last Siege, which remains the best of these three.