The Dragleon

A magical creature is born, curled up inside a flower. With no parents around to name or teach her, she must work out what she is, all by herself. She soon learns that she can blend in perfectly with any plants around her.

When she huffs and puffs only the sweet scent of flowers wafts over her victims, sending them to sleep or making them think happy thoughts. Grasses spring up in her wake, or flowers, if she’s feeling really happy, while thorns tend to shoot up beside her if something makes her cross.

She soon grows very large indeed, so all the other animals fear her and her strange powers and flee at the very sight of her. But she is all alone in the world, with only mute little chameleons for company, for they think nothing of her changing colour and can’t run away from anything much.

Nisa is a little girl with problems of her own. She has a speech impediment, for a start. Her father is a San Bushman, while her mother is black, like pretty much everyone else in her rural South African home. The other children are often mean to her and even her own father resents her because her mother can bear him no sons after her difficult birth.

The strange creature and the little girl meet in the forest and a firm friendship soon forms, while the creature’s magical powers allow the little girl to wish away her speech impediment.

Nisa names the creature a dragleon, the Dragleon, because she looks a bit like a pretty dragon, but can change colour like a chameleon. Her parents refuse to believe Nisa’s fanciful tales of her new friend, Dragleon. Time and again they punish her by giving her horrid chores but each time Dragleon’s magical powers come to her rescue.

When Dragleon is forced to reveal herself to the villagers, they’re terrified and drive her away, but at least now they know that Nisa was telling the truth all along. In the ensuing chaos, the little girl gives her best friend a proper name at last: Jasmine.

When Nisa is finally allowed to accompany her parents to a market, she is seen only as a Bushman child and treated unfairly and unkindly purely because of it. It dawns on her why the other children were once so mean to her and all their parents so rude to her father too. But Nisa now has the confidence to learn her own ways of confronting prejudice, using her wit, faultless manners or undeserved kindness in the face of anything and rapidly earns the respect and admiration of her villagers.

Jasmine slowly becomes accepted by the village and she in turn helps them prosper through her own happiness and her magical powers. Even the threat of thieving monkeys and a bigoted con-man is seen away by both Nisa and Jasmine and Nisa’s bravery finally wins the approval of her now proud father.

An absolutely charming and magical story that brings sheer delight to the reader who can’t but conjure up beautiful flowers and fruits as Dragleon happily weaves her magic. Yet beneath the colour and wonder are the age-old prejudices of colour, race and disability and how the friendship between a young girl and a strange creature develops because they have focused on their similarities rather than their differences and finally overcome the adversities of life.