Squawk — Craig Halloran

A headstrong boy named Gabe bonds with a peculiar dragon in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world. In the year 2025, a nuclear holocaust incinerated the world. Now it is a dark place of despots…and dragons. Gabe has lived his entire life behind the walls of Newton, a secure compound housing the humans who survived the apocalypse. Ruled and repressed by the Dominion elite, the captive populace is kept entertained by “Dragon Games” -- thrilling battles between monstrous beasts raised from hatchlings out of eggs brought in from the ravaged outside by brave hunters like Gabe's father Saul. But Gabe wants something more, and his curiosity and restless spirit lead him secretly past the compound gates and into the wasteland with his father's band of dragon hunters. It is a transgression that earns the boy a dangerous enemy, a painful punishment…and a priceless treasure. Hiding a strangely colored dragon's egg that he and Saul discovered, Gabe returns home with a new dream of becoming a dragon trainer. But that is an honor granted only to privileged children of the Dominion. And the creature that eventually hatches will be unlike any dragon Gabe has ever seen, becoming his friend and closest ally on a winding, perilous path that will lead them together through the fires of revolution and revenge. *** Fans of the dystopian future worlds so brilliantly brought to life by Suzanne Collins in her Hunger Games trilogy, Veronica Roth's Divergent series, and by Pittacus Lore in I Am Number Four, will eagerly welcome the work of another master of YA fantasy. The first book in an ingenious new series, Squawk: Beginnings by Craig Halloran is a coming of age story set in a near-future world destroyed in a nuclear holocaust -- a dark, oppressive tomorrow where evil despots rule a diminished human population and dragons roam the ravaged landscape. The epic story of young Gabe, son of a dragon hunter, and Squawk, the miraculous winged creature who becomes his closest companion, starts here, ushering in an exciting new era of YA fantasy fiction.