Dancing with Dragons - Paperback

From Jenni Ogden, author of multiple-award-winning A Drop in the Ocean, comes another evocative story of friendship, coral reefs, and marine conservation for book-club readers.

It is the late 1970s and Gaia and Bron live on their isolated property on Western Australia's Coral Coast. Intensively trained for a ballet career by her mother, Gaia also loves snorkeling over the coral reef that borders their property. Then comes a day that changes her life forever: she discovers a rare pair of dramatically-colored seadragons, their courtship dance over the coral spellbinding, and that night she loses her entire family and her dancing dream. Two years later she returns to the abandoned property, determined to live off the land. For years her only friends are the wild animals of the bush and reef and Mary and Eddie, an Aboriginal couple who work for the racist farmer on the neighboring property - until one morning Jarrah, Mary's 11-year-old orphaned nephew, is entranced when he sees Gaia, now 18, dancing on the beach. As an unlikely friendship between these two lonely and scarred people deepens, they discover that when you lose everything the only way to survive is to open your heart.
2024 Independent Publisher Book Award GOLD MEDALIST FOR FICTION, Australia/New Zealand-Aotearoa/Pacific Rim