The story falls into the popular urban fantasy genre - a recognizable world of today that is subtly skewed by the addition of some fantastical element, in this case the existence of dragons. Jake lives on the only dragon preserve in America, at an institute in the park dedicated to the study of dragons. One day, seemingly by chance, he finds a dragon dying in the woods - a mother dragon killed by a poacher just as she was giving birth. All but one of her baby dragons are dead, as is the man who killed her. Jake, still trying to cope with the loss of his own mother, looks into the dragon's eye as she is dying and is so moved by what he sees there that he decides to do what he can to save the last of the dragon's litter.

The rest of the book is about raising a baby dragon. It's about the bureaucratic mess caused at the park by the death of the poacher, and the practical and philosophical consequences of Jake's determination to save the baby dragon. It's the kind of story that would be impossibly dull if it weren't so magical, and in this case the breathless pace of the narration counterbalances the steady, grim menace of the government and the long, slow struggle to keep the baby dragon alive. It always feels like a lot is happening, like events are just galloping by, even though there's no real action to speak of.