What I’m Reading: The Dragon Lantern, by Alan Gratz

Songwriters have a saying which goes, basically, that you know when a song is good because you’re sure you’ve heard it before. That’s how I felt sometimes reading Alan Gratz’s League of Seven and its recently released sequel, The Dragon Lantern. It’s not that Gratz’s work isn’t original—far from it: it would be hard to find a more spellbinding and cast of characters, villains and monsters, or a more startling assortment of plot twists, in YA fiction.
At the same time, though, reading The Dragon Lantern is like reading some of the classics of speculative fiction—everything from H.P. Lovecraft to H. Rider Haggard to Tom Swift to James P. Blaylock—all over again with all the freshness and excitement you felt on the first reading. What’s more, Gratz’s alternate-universe America also possesses an epic depth that few fictional worlds achieve, a layered matrix of legend and lore that spans the globe and makes you see some of the world’s oldest stories in a new light.
I highly recommend getting your hands on this series, if only to be able to say you read them when they first came out.