Pillage

Pillage is a YA fantasy novel series by Obert Skye, and is his second series after the Leven Thumps series. It involves A Boy And His Dragons, but it is notable for Deconstructing a lot of the tropes involved wherein someone finds a dragon egg.

Beck Phillips has lived all his life with a slightly-ill mother who insists on moving around a lot. He's having a fairly ordinary day at one of his many, many schools, crawling through the vents to plant a bee bomb (as you do when you're bound to leave the school in a month anyway), when he gets called away to the principal's office for non-prank related reasons. At which point he receives some rather grim news: His mother is dead. Dead dead. She finally succumbed to her illness. Beck barely has time to recover before he learns that he's being sent to live with his immensely rich uncle. Thus, he gets shipped off to the eerie, fog-shrouded mountain town of Kingsplot, where everything seems a century or two out of date. The fog isn't helped by the fact that his uncle is a crazy recluse who never leaves top dome of his vast mansion.

His uncle's servants give him the run of the mansion, but with a few caveats: Stay out of the locked rooms, and stay out of the walled garden. But rules were made to be disobeyed, and with the help of his new local friends, Beck sneaks around the mansion (to find an old diary, that makes several mentions of a curse and an old family legend about dragons) and into the garden (to find a dusty shed full of roundish stones). Not surprisingly, the "stones" turn out to be dragon eggs, which promptly hatch into six mewling, hungry baby dragons.

This turns out to be a very bad thing. Dragons, as it turns out, are very dangerous, hard-to-control creatures, and three kids were not cut out for the job. To make things worse, they have thirst for destruction... and stealing. If left unchecked, the dragons will utterly destroy the town in their quest for valuable items, which they desire to bring back to their "master"--Beck. And the only way to check them? Stabbing them in the throat. Not to mention, Beck may have an old enemy who wants to make use of the dragons for himself.

Beck just can't learn to stay away from dragons, however, and thus, his adventures continue...


 * Egg MacGuffin: A whole bunch of them in the shed.
 * Forbidden Fruit: Beck gets told explicitly by the staff not to go into the garden. Of course it's the first place he tries to get into.
 * Green Thumb: Beck can make plants grow and seemingly communicate with them, which is actually essential to hatching the dragons.
 * Heel Face Turn:
 * : Beck's uncle
 * Our Dragons Are Different: They need special plants to grow around them to hatch, they have short lifespans, they create new eggs when they die,.
 * Supreme Chef: The mansion chef, of course.
 * Two Guys and a Girl: Beck's friend makeup.