Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who is known for her gift of writing novels about difficult topics for young adults and junior readers. Following the enormous success of Lenny’s Book of Everything, which made me cry, this novel Dragon Skin has been greatly anticipated and again shows her ability to explore dark and difficult topics with grace, kindness and hope.
Karen Foxlee
Pip is a young girl, living in a small town, missing her best friend Mika, and spends her time returning to the waterhole where she and Mika would play, hide and imagine a better world. Pip doesn’t want to go home because of her mother’s new boyfriend and Mika lives with his grandmother after his mother runs away from an abusive relationship.
One afternoon, when Pip is at the waterhole, she finds a sick baby dragon and she takes it home to care for it. She feels a deep bond with the dragon and as she nurses it back to health she finds a purpose and connection to something magical, something bigger than herself. When another school mate, Laura, discovers the dragon they form a bond caring for it, and Pip has her first friendship since Mika left.
It’s not an easy thing to walk the path between truth, honesty and compassion while still keeping hope as the undercurrent, especially with such difficult topics of domestic abuse, loss and grief. Foxlee spent much of her adult life as a nurse and it is likely from this experience that she is so gifted at keeping this balance.
The beauty of books like this is that they allow readers who may not have experienced these difficulties in their life personally to gain understanding and compassion for those that have. It can also provide comfort and understanding to those that are living with that reality, to help them not feel so alone, and that is the gift and magic of books.
—Dragon Skin by Karen Foxlee (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
Dragon Skin
How to save a dragon: 1) Assemble equipment. Water, Weet-Bix, sugar, syringe, sticky tape, scissors. 2) Believe in everything.
Pip never wants to go home. She likes to sit at the waterhole at dusk and remember Mika, her best friend. At home her mother's not the same since her boyfriend moved in. They don't laugh anymore and Pip has to go to bed early, turn off her light and pretend she doesn't exist. When she finds a half-dead creature at the waterhole, everything changes. She knows she has to save this small dragon and return it to where it comes from. But how?...
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