by Julie Kagawa
Dragons have been my favorite mythological creature since before I can remember. When I was a teen, all I read was fantasy, and most of my books had a dragon on the cover. In fact, if there was a dragon anywhere on the book, it was pretty much guaranteed that I was going to pick it up and look at it. When I started writing Talon, I wanted to do something different. Dragons have always been a staple of medieval worlds, either as villains for the brave knight to slay, or wise and powerful creatures that the hero implored for help. And while I loved reading those stories, I always wondered what would happen if dragons lived in modern times. Dragons are long lived, powerful and supremely intelligent; if they existed today, they wouldn’t be sitting in caves guarding treasure, they would be the CEOs of billion-dollar companies. And if dragons evolved with the times, surely the knights that hunted them would adapt, as well. They would no longer use swords and lances, not when they could be hunting dragons with machine guns, sniper rifles and modern weapons of destruction. And a story about modern knights fighting dragons in this day and age just seemed really cool.
But, at its core, Talon is a story about “othering,” and how we perceive those who are different than us. Those who look different, talk different, see the world differently—we don’t understand them, and so they must be “bad.” When, if we just sat down and had a real conversation, we might discover that we’re much more alike than we thought. Ember and Garret both challenge the beliefs they were raised with, finding friendship, acceptance and love with someone their society believed was “evil.” If we could do the same, if we could all take that first step toward acceptance and understanding, we might make the world a kinder place. Think of all the things we could learn, if we saw the world through another’s eyes.
That’s not to say we’d discover dragons have been living among us all this time...
But you never know.
ISBN-13: 9781488030482
Inferno
Copyright © 2018 by Julie Kagawa
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