The fifth and final book of the Wings of Fire Dragonet prophecy quintet is Wings of Fire: The Brightest Night (young adult fantasy, 308 pages) by Tui T. Sutherland.

“Sunny has always taken the Dragonet Prophecy very seriously. If Pyrrhia’s dragons need her, Clay, Tsunami, Glory, and Starflight to end the war, she’s ready to try. She even has some good ideas on how to do it, if anyone would listen to her. But shattering news from Morrowseer has shaken Sunny’s faith in their destiny. Is it possible for anyone to end this terrible war and choose a new SandWing queen? What if everything they’ve been through was for nothing? Buried secrets, deadly surprises, and an unexpected side to scavengers are all waiting for her in the shifting sands of the desert, where Sunny must decide once and for all: Is her destiny already written? Or can five dragonets change their fate and save the world … the way they choose?”

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW.

I think this is definitely my favorite of these first five books, as I really appreciate Sunny as a character. We see that she’s not just this super positive, always “sunny” person and that she actually just really wants to help all the other dragons.

One of the things that really stuck with me was when she’s kidnapped by the NightWings so they can take her to Burn for a bounty and they see what her friends have to say about her when they can’t find her. They talk about how she’ll take care of Starflight no matter how upset she is, and how she’ll be happy no matter what and probably even forget about the prophecy in like a week. Even the NightWings who captured her comment on how her friends don’t seem to think much about her intelligence.

It’s like. Just because she believes the best of people and she finds the positives in any of her situations, it means her friends don’t think she has any intelligence and can’t take things seriously. Even from the very first book, the other four dragons don’t tell her they are thinking about escaping from the guardians the Talons of Peace left them with because they don’t think she can keep a secret.

Sunny knows she doesn’t have time to go back to her friends and get help and that she needs to deal with the three NightWings who are going to sell them out to whichever of the three SandWing throne contenders will pay the most for their information, so she follows them, steals the Obsidian Mirror and even leaves a super cryptic message which winds up scaring the NightWings, and follows them to the Scorpion Den. She does all these brave, smart things and none of her friends are there to see it or to help her.

But it’s while she’s on her own that she actually meets both her mother and her father, with her mother being the only one of the dragonet parents who desperately missed and searched for their missing eggs. Sunny’s mother, Thorn, is not what Sunny would have expected, but it’s still really awesome to get to see them interact.

So after everything Sunny goes through, she is definitely the hero of this story. It’s her idea that saves the day and it’s her compassion and ability to look beyond how other dragons / people see each other and their place in the world that allows her to look at the scavengers in a different way; those same scavengers that wind up saving the day. She gives everything around her the chance to communicate and that leads to unearthing the Eye of Onyx, which decisively ends the war and fulfills the prophecy.

I think it’s interesting to look at this story from the perspective of prophecies, as there probably was a bit of real prophecy involved, but also a lot of individual choices of dragons who wanted the prophecy to be real. Most of the dragons they encountered really were exhausted of fighting and desperately wanted peace but none of them felt as though they had the individual ability to make that peace happen. They all needed an outside source to prove that peace COULD happen.

Overall, this book is my favorite of these first five books, rating a solid four on my scale. I’m very grateful I purchased this book and will continue to reread it in the future.

Sutherland, Tui T. The Wings of Fire: The Brightest Night. Scholastic Press, 2014.