The Dragon With a Chocolate Heart

By Stephanie Burgis

Hi! I absolutely loved this book! My favorite character is Aventurine. She is a dragon. Her parents think that she should be more concerned with learning, but she loves adventures. All she wants to do is get out of their mountain, but her parents say that she has to wait another 30 years until she can go out. That’s a long time, right?? So when her family is taking a nap, she sneaks out of the mountain.

The journey to find her meal is long and hard. Then, she finally finds the most dangerous kind of prey - a human. The human’s making something that smells delicious. It smells like chocolate. (It’s hot chocolate.) Aventurine finds her passion in chocolate. She absolutely loves it! Suddenly, everything goes black!

When Aventurine wakes up, everything is tiny around her. It’s like she’s the size of a human being. She tries to open up her wings, but there are no wings there. She realizes she’s human! The human had actually been a food mage. (A mage is a magical being.) The food mage had turned her human when she drank the hot chocolate that he had made. All of a sudden, a pair of humans appear in a carriage (but not a fancy carriage, more of an open basket drawn by horses). They invite her to come with them to their house. But Aventurine has learned not to trust humans. So when they get into town, she runs away.

She searches all over for a “chocolate house.” (Now, she thinks that this would be a house made entirely out of chocolate, but in fact, it’s a house where chocolate is made.) The first two houses that she finds throw her out, so she goes to a different house. The main chef in this house has just thrown out her apprentice, so she lets Aventurine be her new apprentice. She is the best apprentice the chef has ever had. But when something goes wrong, she runs away.

Will Aventurine ever be able to turn back into a dragon? Or will she remain in the helpless human form forever? As I always say, read the book to find out!

A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:

“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor – zero being not scary at all and five being majorly scary): 1