Christian Dragon Books for Kids
What if you lived in a world where dragons were real?
And What if those dragons weren’t the enemy—but the ones who raised you?
And what if you were the only one who could stop the extinction of dragons?
Welcome to The Sword and Story Podcast—where we help Christian families find exciting, faith-filled books for their boys.
Our mission is to raise strong, courageous warriors for the Kingdom of God. Join us on a quest to discover stories that inspire our boys to grow into godly young men.
I’m your host, Laurie Christine. I’m an author, bible teacher, wife, and mom to four wild, wonderful, boys. I’m the author of the Dragon Slayer Bible Series, adventure-packed biblical fiction and devotions for middle-grade boys.
Our guest author today is Bryan Davis.
Bryan Davis is the author of several fantasy/science-fiction novels for youth and adults, including the bestselling series Dragons in Our Midst. He and his wife, Susie, have seven adult children, and they work together as an author/editor team.
The Sacred Scales
A Christian Dragon Book for Kids
A middle grade faith-building fantasy adventure from the bestselling Dragons in Our Midst story world.
In King Arthur’s Camelot where dragons are outlawed, a poor apprentice boy and a dragon-raised orphan girl unravel an evil plot to exterminate dragons from this world and the next.
Hawk spends his days trying to survive as a lowly apprentice in the harsh employ of Master Andrew―a sly shopkeeper making illegal bargains with dragons. But when Master Andrew is hired by Lady Morgan to cheat the dragon Clefspeare out of his promised gemstone payment, Hawk’s faith in God spurs him to action.
Sabina hasn’t had contact with humans in years, not since the kind-hearted dragon Legossi rescued her from the ruins of her burned village. But the forest is no place for a young girl to come of age, so Legossi agrees to have a knight take Sabina to Lady Morgan’s estate. Yet Sabina quickly realizes Lady Morgan has a sinister scheme to wipe out dragons in this realm and beyond. Can Hawk and Sabina warn the dragons and foil Lady Morgan’s plans before it’s too late?
More Christian Dragon Books for Kids by Bryan Davis
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW
Sacred Scales, By Bryan Davis
What if you lived in a world where dragons were real? What if those dragons weren’t the enemy, but the ones who raised you? What if you were the only one who could stop the extinction of dragons?
Welcome to the Sword and Story podcast, where we help Christian families find exciting, faith-filled books for their boys.
Our guest author today is Brian Davis. Brian is the author of several fantasy and science fiction novels for youth and adults, including the bestselling series, Dragons in Our Midst. He and his wife, Suzy, have seven adult children, and they work together as an author-editor team.
Laurie Christine: Brian Davis, welcome to the Sword and Story podcast.
Bryan Davis: Thank you, Laurie. It’s great to be here.
Laurie Christine: We’re excited to have you on the show today. I have been looking forward to this interview because it’s always fun to connect with other Christian authors who write about dragons. I came across your series as I was doing some research for my own books, the Dragon Slayer Bible series. It’s always fun to see other Christian authors writing about dragons.
Before we dive into the books, I want to talk briefly about boys and raising boys. You have seven adult children. How many of those kids are boys and girls?
Bryan Davis: Three of them are boys and four are girls.
Laurie Christine: Three boys. Did you notice any differences between your boys and your girls as they were growing up?
Bryan Davis: Night and day. There’s just no doubt about it. You think about a toddler—two years old—you give a boy a banana and it becomes a sword or a gun or something else. It ends up like mashed banana on the floor. If you give a girl a banana, she eats it. They are so different.
Laurie Christine: I love that. Boys just somehow have this innate sense of battle and fighting. They are created to be warriors—adventurous.
How would you complete this statement: You know there are boys who live in your house if…?
Bryan Davis: You suddenly see a parachute coming down from the roof. Something slimy has been dragged across the kitchen floor. Somebody comes up to you with a math question that seems impossible to solve, even if you had calculus in college. They’re always something new, something different—something we don’t even know how to explain. That’s how you know you have boys.
Laurie Christine: I would agree. The parachute is like, you didn’t even know you were supposed to address that issue until it came up. You’re like, where did you even think of that? Where did you come up with that?
I’m curious—what was the slimy thing across the floor?
Bryan Davis: One time it was a lost dog dragging muddy footprints. You just never know. It’s always something covered with bugs sometimes.
Laurie Christine: You never know. I found shark teeth in my dryer one time. My son had bought a jar of shark teeth at the beach, and I was finding them all over the house—in the most random places. You know you have boys when you find shark teeth just randomly laying around.
Bryan Davis: That’s for sure.
Laurie Christine: Transitioning into dragons: your book series, Dragons in Our Midst—we’re going to talk about it in more detail in a second. When you first published those books in 2004, did you get any pushback from Christian publishers or readers? Were people skeptical about Christian books with dragons?
Bryan Davis: Yes, there was quite a bit of pushback. I go to homeschool conferences a lot and sell books there. Early on, people would look at the dragon books and make a wide berth around my booth. I did a book signing in a Christian bookstore and had somebody tell me my books were of the devil. There was a lot of pushback, but nearly all of it was early on. I rarely hear that anymore.
Now I have parents who are excited about the books, especially with very popular secular book series that have dragons that are very much non-Christian or even anti-Christian. They want alternatives. The pushback was considerable early on, but it’s very rare now.
Laurie Christine: I’ve seen that too. I go to homeschool conventions and most families are excited. Most kids are excited because they’re drawn to the legends of dragons, and they’re excited to have a Christian version that teaches biblical values and is clean.
I did have one family come by and wrinkle their nose and say, “Dragons—we don’t do books about dragons.” I said, “Okay, that’s fine.”
Bryan Davis: It still happens to me occasionally, not nearly as much as it used to.
Laurie Christine: Why do you think that trend has changed? Why were Christians skeptical about dragons for so long—and why has that shifted over the past 10 or 15 years?
Bryan Davis: The reasoning is that the Bible portrays Satan as a dragon in the book of Revelation, so it’s an automatic association. If you have dragons, it must be of the devil. For years I had to explain that a dragon is merely a creature. If there is such a thing as a dragon, it was created by God, therefore it was not inherently evil—just like the angels of God were not inherently evil.
Some fell and became fallen angels. Anything evil had to corrupt itself. It’s not inherent. I don’t know if my explanations helped much, but Christian publishers picked it up, and people read the books and saw they were uplifting, edifying, and spiritually strong. Over time, people change their minds.
Laurie Christine: My books are based on the passage in Revelation where Satan is described as a dragon—so in my books, Satan is the dragon.
Bryan Davis: In my books, Satan is a dragon too, but some dragons are good and some dragons aren’t. The heroic dragons are good, and the villain dragons are not. It’s the way it is with angels and humans and everything else.
Laurie Christine: I listened to a podcast series—Bible Project did a whole series on dragons in the Bible—and it was fascinating. I did a lot of research on dragons in the Bible. The first dragon was mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis. A lot of modern translations don’t use the word dragon, but when God created the monsters of the deep, some earlier translations translate that as sea monsters or dragons. God created them. They’re good creatures.
Bryan Davis: Job 41 talks about Leviathan. It breathes fire. It sounds just like a dragon.
Laurie Christine: For sure. If you don’t mind answering: do you think dragons were real live creatures at one time, or are they mythology?
Bryan Davis: I think it’s a blend. Leviathan was clearly a real creature, and it did breathe fire—smoke and fire come out of his mouth and nostrils. So there was a real dragon. Whether it looks exactly like they’re portrayed now, maybe not. Leviathan seemed to be a water creature that could breathe air, because how could it breathe fire if it was always underwater?
So I think dragons were real, but how they’re portrayed now might not be how they really were. Mythology has evolved about dragons, even though some form of a dragon was real at one time.
Laurie Christine: I agree. The typical medieval dragon we picture now—based on the research I did—only appeared later in literature and images. A lot of ancient literature and mythology had sea creatures—water dragons of some sort. It’s a fun thing to think about.
Let’s talk about your books. Your original series is called Dragons in Our Midst. Give us an overview of that series.
Bryan Davis: It starts with Raising Dragons. It’s about two teenagers who learn that each has a parent who used to be a dragon. Because of that, they start developing physical dragon traits. One of them hasn’t even been told that he has that heritage, so he doesn’t know how to guard himself against people finding out that his breath is getting hotter and hotter.
A modern-day dragon slayer finds out about him, and that puts him in danger. His father—a former dragon—has to change back into a dragon to protect him from that slayer. That’s why it’s Dragons in Our Midst: modern times, a contemporary setting where we now have dragons.
It started as a dream I had about a boy who could breathe fire. I told my oldest son about it—he was 13 at the time—and he said, “Dad, you should write a story.” So we brainstormed. Boys love imagination, weird, strange things, and we came up with the idea that became Raising Dragons. As you go along, there are more dragons, more villains, and more adventures. It gets more complex with lots of fun characters.
Laurie Christine: That is so fun. I love that your son saw that inspiration and said, “You’ve got to write a book about that.” Had you been writing books prior to that? Were you an author at that point?
Bryan Davis: I was trying to be an author. More than 30 years ago, I started writing a story with my kids because I wanted them to get interested in writing. They were homeschooled, so we wrote a story together—a full-length novel. I tried to get it published and got lots of rejection notices. This was back before self-publishing existed.
About two years into trying to learn to be a better writer, that’s when I had the dream. My son said, “You should write a story about that dream because it’d be a lot better than that other stuff you’ve been writing.” Another thing about boys: they’re brutally honest sometimes.
Laurie Christine: He had good insight. Maybe God gave you that dream to launch your writing career.
Bryan Davis: I’m confident that’s the way it happened.
Laurie Christine: There are four books in the original series. What are the titles?
Bryan Davis: Raising Dragons, The Candlestone, Circles of Seven, and Tears of a Dragon.
Laurie Christine: I love the premise. A lot of dragon stories are the classic knight fighting a dragon, or rescue the fair maiden, or it’s all dragons—an anthropomorphic universe. But humans discovering they’re part dragon, or their dad used to be a dragon—that’s unique.
This is a modern-day story, but there are tie-ins to medieval themes and Camelot. How does that all work together?
Bryan Davis: There’s a very strong King Arthur background. I wanted to say, if dragons transformed into humans at some point, I should go back and look at how that happened. When my son and I were brainstorming, he said, “We should do it in medieval time. We should have Merlin transform them.”
I’ve always had trouble using magic in a story for a heroic Christian-type character. So we decided Merlin could be a Christian who asked God for a miracle to protect the good dragons from the dragon slayers of the time.
If there are evil dragons causing mayhem, dragon slayers are going to want to kill them, but they’re not going to knock on the door and ask if you’re a good dragon or a bad dragon. They’ll kill them all. Merlin, who knew the good dragons, asked God to protect them by transforming them into humans. Since they retained their dragon genetics, they would live a very long time.
When the last dragon slayer died, then they would transform back, because there wouldn’t be any evil dragons around anymore to give them a bad name. But one of the dragon slayers continued living on and on, still searching for them in modern times. How did he live? That’s part of the story. They never got to change back, so the father of the boy had to find a loophole.
Laurie Christine: That is such a fun story. Sometimes Christian fantasy is allegory, with underlying themes. It seems like yours is more outright. What does that look like?
Bryan Davis: It is definitely overtly Christian. There’s no allegory. They pray, they sing the Psalms, there’s salvation. It’s overt.
Laurie Christine: One question I always ask our guests is: how can your books help boys become strong, courageous warriors for the kingdom of God?
Bryan Davis: Fantasy often has battles—good versus evil—fighting, even strong violent scenes. What I try to show with heroic characters is that anytime they accept the opportunity to get into a battle, they always have an unselfish motivation to make a change for the better. There’s someone to rescue, someone to keep from getting killed, to topple the tyrant, whatever.
It lets boys know the feeling inside you—the desire to flex your muscles and go out and fight—there’s a reason for it. God put that in you. You have to understand when it’s appropriate: when you’re helping somebody else, when you’re being sacrificial, when you’re being selfless. You go out to stop the bully, not to be the bully.
It channels that aggressiveness boys naturally feel—what God put in them. We show scene after scene of heroic boys doing exactly that.
Laurie Christine: I love that. We talk about that on the show: God created our boys with natural desires for battle and the drive to defend. We want to channel those desires toward good outcomes—using strength for good and for God’s kingdom.
It goes back to the banana example. Even as two-year-olds, boys turn everything into a weapon. They have this natural inclination and understanding that there is evil in the world—bad guys. When we played house with my boys, there was always the mom, the dad, the baby, and the bad guy. Someone had to build booby traps to defend the house. God created our boys that way, and we want to teach them how to use that strength for good.
Bryan Davis: There’s another strength that many boys like to use, and that’s their words—their voices. Boys want to say big things and be powerful with their speeches. That starts early on too: “My daddy can beat up your daddy.” Trash talk and cutting other kids down. They want to say things that make a difference.
In Christian fantasy we often see great oratory—think of Lord of the Rings when Aragorn comes out with his sword and musters the troops and encourages them with a big speech. I try to put into my stories the boys saying things that build up. They don’t cut each other down. They don’t insult each other. They’re always building up.
That’s another way to encourage boys. You want to use your words—here’s how you use them. I’ve always done that with my kids: “Congratulations. You did it. I knew you could.” I’m always building them up. Even when they were disobedient, I would say, “I know you can do better than that.”
Laurie Christine: Giving them a vision for what they can be rather than getting stuck in where they are right now.
Bryan Davis: And not telling them they’re bad or stupid. We’re always building them up. That’s another power.
Laurie Christine: I love that you model that in your books—using words to encourage and build up rather than tear down.
I want to talk about your book that just came out in June 2025: The Sacred Scales. This is a prequel series to Dragons in Our Midst. Give us an overview of what it’s about.
Bryan Davis: It’s a prequel series. We have a backstory of King Arthur and Camelot times, and I wanted to expand on that backstory. Raising Dragons has a one-chapter flashback about the dragon transformation. Now we’re doing four books that go much deeper into how that came about.
I wanted something that would appeal to a younger reader. Parents would say, “My kids want to read about dragons, but your books are 400 pages long and my nine-year-old can’t handle that.” So I made a smaller book with heroic characters—an 11-year-old boy and girl—who help stop a war between humans and dragons. They give Merlin an opportunity to work out the transformation, and they’re heavily involved in all of it.
I’ve already written all four books. We’re waiting for the publisher to release them. It’s been a blast. I don’t dumb down the stories. If I want a vocabulary word that might be beyond their reach, one of the dragons might define it. “Hey Merlin, what does that word mean?” “Oh, that means this.” It was fun to do that. All the adventure, the battles, sacrificial love, and the virtues are in the story.
Laurie Christine: This first book is called The Sacred Scales, book one in Dragons of Camelot. You said it’s for a younger age range—what’s the age range for the original Dragons in Our Midst series?
Bryan Davis: The target age is 10 to 16, but it’s accessible to younger readers who can handle a big book. There’s nothing inappropriate. It’s more about, “Can you handle a book that size?” I do have seven- and eight-year-old readers. Dragons of Camelot targets more eight- to 12-year-olds. They’re shorter books with younger main characters.
Laurie Christine: If new readers start with this prequel series, they could go on to read Dragons in Our Midst as they get older. Would it work to read the prequel series first, then the original series?
Bryan Davis: Yes. As a prequel series, it can definitely be read first. It can also be read after Dragons in Our Midst. It can be read anytime in the 12-book story world I already had, because it’s a prequel series. You can start with it, or read it after you’ve read all 12. I designed it intentionally that way.
Laurie Christine: Real quick—there are sequel series to the original series. What are the names of those series, and do they continue with the same main characters?
Bryan Davis: Oracles of Fire is the second series. The books are Eye of the Oracle, Enoch’s Ghost, Last of the Nephilim, and The Bones of Makaidos.
Eye of the Oracle is sort of a prequel book. It goes back to the time of Noah and shows two dragons on the ark with Noah. It also has a section in Camelot, but it does not cover all the same things that Dragons of Camelot does. Then it takes us back into modern times and sets you up for the second book, Enoch’s Ghost, which takes place immediately after the end of the fourth Dragons in Our Midst book. So Eye of the Oracle is a pause to give more background, and then Enoch’s Ghost picks it up.
The third series is called Children of the Bard. It picks up 15 years after Oracles of Fire. The first book is Song of the Ovulum. The second is From the Mouth of Elijah. The third is The Seventh Door. The fourth is Omega Dragon. That goes to the end of the age.
I’m not going to do spoilers. I’m not going to give away any end-times theology, because it doesn’t matter which way you believe this book will be.
Laurie Christine: I’m going to close by reading the back cover copy of The Sacred Scales:
A middle grade, faith-building fantasy adventure from the bestselling Dragons in Our Midst story world.
In King Arthur’s Camelot—where dragons are outlawed—a poor apprentice boy and a dragon-raised orphan girl unravel an evil plot to exterminate dragons from this world and the next.
Hawk spends his days trying to survive as a lowly apprentice in the harsh employ of Master Andrew, a sly shopkeeper making illegal bargains with dragons. But when Master Andrew is hired by Lady Morgan to cheat the dragon Clefspear out of his promised gemstone payment, Hawk’s faith in God spurs him to action.
Sabina has not lived among humans in years, not since the kind-hearted dragon Lugosi rescued her from the ruins of her burned village. But the forest is no place for a young girl to come of age, so Lugosi agrees to have a knight take Sabina to Lady Morgan’s estate. Yet Sabina quickly realizes Lady Morgan has a sinister scheme to wipe out dragons in this realm and beyond. Can Hawk and Sabina warn the dragons and foil Lady Morgan’s plans before it’s too late?
Brian, where can our listeners learn more about you and your books?
Bryan Davis: My website is daviscrossing.com. My Facebook page is facebook.com/bryandavis.fans, and I post on that about things that are coming up.
Laurie Christine: Great. We’ll make sure we have a link to your website and your social media channels in the show notes. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been so much fun chatting with you.
Bryan Davis: It’s been a pleasure, Laurie. Thanks for having me.
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