To Shape a Dragon's Breath

The remote island of Masquapaug has not seen a dragon in many generations—until fifteen-year-old Anequs finds a dragon’s egg and bonds with its hatchling. Her people are delighted, for all remember the tales of the days when dragons lived among them and danced away the storms of autumn, enabling the people to thrive. To them, Anequs is revered as Nampeshiweisit—a person in a unique relationship with a dragon.

Unfortunately for Anequs, the Anglish conquerors of her land have different opinions. They have a very specific idea of how a dragon should be raised, and who should be doing the raising—and Anequs does not meet any of their requirements. Only with great reluctance do they allow Anequs to enroll in a proper Anglish dragon school on the mainland. If she cannot succeed there, her dragon will be killed.

For a girl with no formal schooling, a non-Anglish upbringing, and a very different understanding of the history of her land, challenges abound—both socially and academically. But Anequs is smart, determined, and resolved to learn what she needs to help her dragon, even if it means teaching herself. The one thing she refuses to do, however, is become the meek Anglish miss that everyone expects.

Anequs and her dragon may be coming of age, but they’re also coming to power, and that brings an important realization: the world needs changing—and they might just be the ones to do it.

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Fantasy Young Adult Dragons

Release date: May 9, 2023

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Moniquill Blackgoose

Moniquill Blackgoose writes fantasy from a perspective that was largely missing from the genre when she first fell in love with it. An enrolled member of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe and a lineal descendant of Ousamequin Massasoit, she began writing science fiction and fantasy at twelve. As she later reflected, the stories she encountered as a young reader rarely allowed Indigenous people to exist as central characters in fantasy, an absence that eventually became an important part of what she wanted to change through her own work.

That perspective is at the heart of her fiction. Her debut novel, To Shape a Dragon's Breath, places an Indigenous teenager at the center of a richly imagined alternate-history fantasy, using dragons, magic, and a school setting to explore cultural identity, assimilation, colonialism, and radically different ways of understanding the world. Rather than treating Indigenous culture as an accessory to a familiar fantasy setting, Blackgoose builds the story around an Indigenous worldview and lets its values shape the characters, relationships, and conflicts.

The approach quickly established her as an important new voice in speculative fiction. To Shape a Dragon's Breath became a national bestseller and won the Astounding, Nebula, and Lodestar Awards, while also receiving nominations for the Locus and British Fantasy Newcomer Awards. Its success led into To Ride a Rising Storm, which continues Anequs's story while widening the series' focus from the pressures of an Anglish academy to the struggle for her people's right to govern themselves.

Her influences range widely. She has cited Mary Shelley and Jane Austen for their prose and nineteenth-century narrative style, Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler for world-building, and Anne McCaffrey and Naomi Novik for their approaches to dragons. That mixture helps explain the particular character of her fiction: thoughtful and politically aware, but still deeply interested in the sheer wonder of speculative storytelling.

Outside her novels, Blackgoose has written and spoken extensively about the representation of Indigenous and Indigenous-coded characters in science fiction and fantasy. She is also an avid costumer and active member of the steampunk community, interests that sit naturally alongside her fascination with speculative worlds and alternative histories. Her work ultimately asks a deceptively simple question: what might fantasy look like when the people who were historically pushed to the margins are instead allowed to define the world themselves?

Nampeshiweisit

In Moniquill Blackgoose’s Nampeshiweisit series, dragons are not simply creatures of legend or weapons to be mastered. They are part of a world where knowledge, culture, and power have been shaped by generations of conflict. When fifteen-year-old Anequs, an Indigenous girl from the island of Masquapaug, discovers a dragon egg and raises the hatchling Kasaqua, she awakens a bond her people have not seen for generations. That discovery draws her into a society determined to teach her its own rules, history, and ideas about dragons.