Book Review: The Baby Dragon Café by A T Qureshi

Well, here’s the surprise of the year. I saw this book in Sainsbury’s and I thought it looked kinda cute and slightly different from the sort of thing I’d normally read. I might read a café book (my own book, A Little Treat on Honey Street, is a classic café book!), but dragons not so much. Although, having said that, I did enjoy Harry Potter and I do love children’s books, especially the How To Train Your Dragon books read on Audible by the exceptionally talented David Tennant. This looked kind of YA so I thought I’d give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised to find The Baby Dragon Café incredibly imaginative. Read on after the picture

Dragon (not the most imaginatively named beast in our menagerie) enjoying a read on Kindle

Now I’ll be honest, I haven’t read anything else like this before so maybe there’s loads of fantasy café books out there but I thought the combination of the fantasy/dragon genre with the cosy café genre was really cute and seemed original to me.

Our heroine is Saphira, a girl of unspecified South Asian origin who is a second or third generation immigrant living in what sounds like an English-speaking European or North American (Starshine Valley). Exactly where doesn’t matter – it’s a fantasy book. The point is, she’s obviously an outsider from an immigrant family. The society in which she finds herself is divided into “drakkon” families (who are effectively aristocrats who are allowed to own and ride dragons) and everyone else (who can’t and don’t).

Saphira loves dragons and wishes she could have a baby dragon. When her grandmother leaves her a small inheritance Saphira sets up the eponymous café, where baby dragons are allowed. But of course, baby dragons, while small and cute, are not trained; they’re a nuisance and they keep wrecking the place. When a baby dragon destroys her espresso machine she thinks she’s going to have to close down the café because she doesn’t have enough money to replace it. A guy called Aidan comes along with a very unruly baby dragon called Sparky and offers her a sum of money (which is handily enough the amount she needs to replace the espresso machine) to help train his little dragon.

As you can imagine over the many pages Saphira, Aidan and the dragon Sparky all bond with each other. Clearly this is an interesting dilemma because Saphira doesn’t belong in Aidan’s world.

There are some really unexpected imaginative twists and there’s a bit exciting fantasy jeopardy towards the end which is quite cool. So it’s just a sweet romance with this kind of fantasy element – dragons, jewels and places high up in the mountains – as well as coffees and pastries and I think AT Qureshi gets the balance between the two just right so that it’s somehow believable in this cute cupcake world that all this magical stuff is also going on.

I think it’s really clever.

The author's cultural heritage shines through in her prose style, emphasising the sense of Saphira's longing to belong, despite her otherness. The non-British-English made it endearing and felt authentic to the heroine and the references to delicious-sounding Pakistani desserts and drinks give the whole thing an exotic feel which drew me into Saphira's world, which is otherwise quite lightly sketched.

I think this story was really imaginative and cute and I’m really looking forward to reading the next book – The Baby Dragon Bakery, which came out on 28 August.

I definitely recommend The Baby Dragon Café if you like cute cupcake cafes and enjoy fantasy in a cosy kind of way, or just want to read something a bit different. Maybe there’s tons of this kind of stuff out there but it’s new for me and I’m really looking forward to some more of it.