I'm not sure when I bought this YA fantasy novel, possibly a novella, and its first couple of sequels from their author, Simon Driscoll, at some Arizona convention or other, but they've languished on my signed shelves for far too long. It's light and enjoyable enough, but it feels less like a story and more like what happens before that story truly begins. In some ways, it's a book-length prologue, though that book is only a hundred pages of prose with relatively generous spacing. In others, it's more like a prequel to an established series that was merely published before any of the others.

Given the title, you won't be shocked to find that it's all about an orphan named Dani, who turns fourteen at the outset and spends a year being shoehorned onto a particular path, only to ditch it and make a choice of her own. She's gone through a host of different foster families, ending up in the household of the Velmors, Ashej and Eyrim, who are decent enough but not close to the most important character in her life; namely a dragon called Miazan who she meets in secret because he's hiding in a cave from the townsfolk of Barrington. It's Miazan who teaches her etiquette and good vocabulary.

In the cave with Miazan, Dani is an interesting character who shows potential. Outside it, she isn't a particularly sympathetic character, even though she falls prey to bullies in the street, the leader of whom is Jerzy, the son of Barrington's sheriff. I think Driscoll aims for her to seem disassociated and independent and that's fine, but she's a bit of a brat here, all the more so after she's rescued from the bullies by a mage called Bixby, who may or may not be her uncle. She certainly begins to call him that at one point, but I'm not sure she's actually given good reason except in the sense of being respectful, as the Chinese tend to do with elders.

Anyway, Driscoll runs us through a whole swathe of fantasy tropes, most of which follow tradition but a few of which are more unusual. For instance, Bixby promised her mother—yes, he knows who her parents are—that he'd administer the Mage's Test on her when she came of age at fourteen and so he does, but she fails. That's a routine fantasy convention agreeably turned on its head. A further routine fantasy convention is to have a young female character hang out with an old and wise dragon and Driscoll does that too, but he adds the detail that dragons aren't born but made. Every dragon used to be a human being who chose to become a dragon and I like that.

It's not entirely new, as many fantasy dragons can take human form, whether we're talking about Maleficent in 'Sleeping Beauty' or Eustace in 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader', and there are plenty of antecedents in Slavic and Chinese mythology, but I don't recall an instance where a human had an actual choice about it. The complication here is that becoming a dragon apparently warps the human soul, so that humans who turn into dragons become "mean-spirited power-hungry animals, corrupted by the magic they possess".

Of course, Dani wants to become a dragon, though we're never entirely sure why. Surely, there's an element of escape in her thinking and there are odd romantic overtones—odd because Maziel is hundreds of years old and Dani is almost fifteen—but we can't be sure if revenge factors into it as well. If it does, then surely that's a corrupting influence going in, which will flavour the future books in the series. Maybe I'm reaching.

What matters is that she's clearly given two options and we always know which one she's going to take. After she fails the Mage's Test, Bixby keeps her around and educates her, mostly to become a merchant but also in basic skills like how new clothes change everything. She learns that one by dressing in expensive attire and experiencing very different treatment from the entire town. It's a good option to take, using Bixby's endless resources—he has a popup armoire that works rather like Linux workspaces in that different keys show different contents and a magic bag that doesn't merely shrink but also preserves in order to provide whatever's needed whenever it's needed. Of course, the other options is from Miazan: ditch the human world and become a dragon.

Eventually, of course, she ends up being given a quest, to obtain the three crystals of Kaldonia for no apparent reason and I believe that quest takes up the next book, if not the one after that too. The point is that it feels like it's the real story here and it doesn't begin until the very end of this book. Driscoll even floats a new character, Merved, who will be undertaking the same quest along with Dani, but we don't quite get to him when 'Orphan Dani' ends. It all underlines how this seems like a prologue. I'll go with prologue over prequel, by the way, because Driscoll ended up writing a prequel called 'The Dragon's Bane', which gave its name to the series, 'Dragon's Bane Chronicles'.

This is an easy book to enjoy, especially given that it's such a quick read, an easy one session job. However, it doesn't seem sure about what it wants to be, entirely aside from being a prologue. It was published as Young Adult Fantasy and that's the most obvious genre to pick, but there are a few points where Driscoll clearly wanted to write a book for adults as well and couldn't resist the urge in this moment and that one. While he writes children's fantasy when writing fantasy about characters who are children, he drifts into adult's fantasy when writing fantasy about characters who are adults, like Dani's parents. There's also that weird romantic subtext that I'm hoping is a sort of adolescent crush that will pass.

I think I need to dive deeper to be able to judge the series. This is, after all, merely the beginning of the beginning, so everything could change as the series runs on and gains focus. Let's find out. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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