Twelve-year-old Ember tries to save ice dragons and learns her own strength along the way.Infant fire dragon Ember is discovered in Wales by Lionel St. George, a brilliant but error-prone Stormancer and Magician, near the bodies of her slain, fire-dragon parents, hunted down for their valuable scales. To protect her, Lionel casts a spell to disguise Ember as a human child, and she grows up at Chesterfield University, where Lionel teaches. In human form, Ember has the fire dragon's ability to create fire, but she can't control it. Distraught after she burns Lionel's office, Ember decides to live in Antarctica at the research station Lionel's sister runs. Fawcett's story starts out slowly, with a tad too much explanation, but the plot picks up intriguingly as Ember, homesick in Antarctica, is befriended by Nisha, the child of one of the station's scientists, and the mysterious orphan Moss. When Ember learns that there is to be a Winterglass Hunt to kill ice dragons for their scales, she is horrified and determines to sabotage it. Neatly sidestepping tropes and templates, Fawcett's story is full of original details that add depth to the fairly straightforward plot (Montgomery, the enchanted, cantankerous doorknob, is a hoot). But it is the richly nuanced primary and secondary characters, as well as the evenhanded inclusion of females as intelligent scientists, that give the story its richness. The cast is racially varied; Ember, her adoptive family, and Moss read as white while Nisha has brown skin.Fresh and original. (Fantasy. 9-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Being a 12-year-old girl can be challenging in the best circumstances, but it's exponentially harder when you possess a pair of invisible wings and are prone, in warm weather, to bursting into flames. Ember is a dragon girl born a dragon but magicked into a human child by her rescuer-turned-adoptive-father. Though she appears human, a few peculiar dragon traits remain, so fire-prone Ember abandons Victorian London for her aunt's scientific outpost in Antarctica, where she quickly finds herself in a different type of dragon drama. Fawcett's feisty female protagonist inhabits a world that is familiar but not completely identical to ours, a place where magic coexists with science, Great Britain actively rules Antarctica, and dragons are hunted to near extinction. The influence of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (1996) cited as one of the author's favorite books is strong here in the best possible way. Stunning descriptions and well-rounded characters are woven into a story that hums with excitement and adventure, which will leave readers wanting more of Ember and her magical world.--Emily Graham Copyright 2010 Booklist