• Age: 9 to 12
• Grade: 4 to 7
• Reading age: 9 to 12

Ten-year-old Elizabeth is spending the summer at her Great-Aunt Germaines, in rural Caradoc County. Also along for the visit is her brother, Eddie, and her mother. Great-Aunt Germaine seems to be a forbidding character, and Beth does not warm up to her. Between her relationship with Aunt Germaine and Eddies antics, Elizabeth feels overwhelmed. She discovers her aunts emporium, a former tourist attraction. It is a fascinating place, filled with memorabilia, including old newspaper reports of a mysterious swamp monster. Elizabeths own adventure begins when she finds a perfectly egg-shaped stone in the local graveyard. Its brilliantly white, warm, and pulsing with energy and it feels like theres something inside. Encouraged by her eccentric great-aunt, Beth builds a nest for the egg stone. When the egg hatches, Elizabeths imagination guides her in a fantastical search for the runaway hatchling. Her investigations, abetted by her great-aunt, lead her to believe that the hatchling is the legendary Caradoc Swamp Monster. Elizabeths efforts to prove her deductions bring her into ever more fiery conflict with Eddie. What hatches is a zany adventure involving quick mud, skunk cabbage, swamp monsters, dragon dives, bonfires, fiery words and broiling tempers. Its a summer of dragons. The solution to both the mystery of the egg stone and the problem of sibling rivalry are satisfyingly reached in the humorous and imaginative conclusion of Summer Dragons.

Holly Haggarty was born in 1960 in Midland, Ontario. She grew up in Toronto, fifth in a family of ten children and attended Loretto College School. In a wonderful, magical moment, when she started grade one, she discovered she knew how to read. She spent the rest of her childhood immersed (whenever possible) in books, her preference being storybooks. Stories provided obvious material to help her with her everyday childhood chore of caring for younger siblings. Her storytelling talents led her to take on part-time jobs which offered more opportunities for storytelling: babysitter, camp counsellor, waitress, host at the Ontario Science Centre, drama teacher, rat catcher... Holly graduated three times from the University of Ottawa, after having read thousands of books, some in old English, some en français, some largely in Latin. Finally she realized that storybooks in any language were still what appealed to her most and what she wanted to build her career around. So she became a mother, teacher, storyteller, writer. Holly Haggarty has published poems and articles in arts magazines and educational journals. Dream Dad was her first novel for children and was followed by Summer Dragons in 2007.

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