Eleanore Jones was left in a foundling home in London prior to the First World War. When she started hearing voices and claiming that gemstones were singing, she was consigned to an institution for mental disorders. The onset of the war sees her sent to a coastal village school, where for the first time she discovers why she is different and what the voices she has learnt to ignore actually mean. For Elanore is of a line of dragons, called Drakon, and the few that are left recognise one another....

THE SWEETEST DARK tells how Lora, now a charity student at a school for upper-crust young ladies, with bombed London behind her, takes time to settle. Jesse, a young coachman, knows why his touch resonates with Lora, why she finds him fascinating, but the school edicts forbid them to meet. This school is located in a castle on an island, and Lora's tower room is the first taste of privacy she's had. The other girls disdain her, the lessons are difficult, but a piano suddenly brings out music that Lora has never been taught to play, and she gets noticed by Lord Armand, a young man whose family is paying her scholarship.

I observed similarities with Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey, another young adult tale about music and dragons and boarding school. Shana Abe however has given us a girl who literally is a dragon, hidden inside her like Ursula LeGuin's Tehanu and ready to fly only when she matures. Even without the dragon aspect the quality of writing and settings would have kept me reading. I did think that the wealthy girls must have been very insecure to persecute Lora, when their breeding and training would have led them to talk around her or make allowances rather than scorn her viciously. But it has to be said that she did not help herself by insulting them as soon as she met them for breakfast.

The echoes of zeppelin-dropped bombs drifting up the Channel and older brothers having signed up are a constant background reminder of the times, but life at school is quiet. When the action finally gets going the sequence where Lora, unskilled at her new abilities, tries to counter two zeppelins while changing from girl to smoke to dragon without any control or constancy, is well worth the wait. Young adult girls will love THE SWEETEST DARK and there is a follow-up, The Deepest Night.