Lily Berlin Dodd tosses her hat into the dragon arena with her middle grade fantasy The Last Ember. In Dodd’s debut, private school tween Eva is accidentally given the egg of an unhatched aerimander, a dragonlike creature. When orphan Dusty attempts to steal the egg from Eva, the two wind up needing to work together to protect it from falling into the hands of sinister forces. We spoke with Dodd about crafting her own dragon tale, her favorite aspects of worldbuilding, and depicting the effects of classism on friendship.

What was the most fun aspect of the worldbuilding for this book?

A lot of the world, especially for Dusty, is built on this network of crime unions. I was thinking about the different crime unions, and what they represent and their symbolism as they all have different tattoos. I’ve always been extremely fascinated by boarding schools, and creating the world of Eva in this elite all-girls science academy was really fun.

I also [enjoyed] getting to play in a world that’s very anachronistic, having certain types of technology exist while others don’t—like, they have a telegraph machine, but they also will occasionally use carrier pigeons. They have flight technology, but not in a way we would recognize now. That’s been fun, to feel like there are no rules, as long as it makes sense.

Your bio mentions that you work in education, particularly for the literacy nonprofit Writers and Artists Across the Country. Can you share a bit about how your work there has impacted you?

The organization is really cool. We work with other nonprofits along with educators and authors to send authors and illustrators to Title One schools around the country. The feedback we get from visits is that these are wonderful, joyful days, and kids leave feeling so inspired to do more reading, more writing. That’s driven home to me the importance of children’s literature. I feel grateful that I can work both as an author and as a program coordinator for WAAC.

Eva and Dusty come from different worlds as the daughter of a prominent figure and an orphan. How did you want this story to address the wealth disparity in their world and their growing friendship?

It starts not as a friendship but as an enemy-ship. It’s very antagonistic at first, and they both come in with assumptions about each other based on their backgrounds. The story of them becoming friends with this aerimander is really the story of those assumptions being challenged again and again.

Dragons have long been a mainstay in the fantasy genre. How did they make their way into your story and what made them the right creature for this novel?

A lot of this book deals with intersections between science and magic and where myth and fact touch. I was reading about medieval European salamander myths, and how there’s this idea that these creatures must hatch in fire, because whenever we place this log and light a fire, all these salamanders pour out of it. It turns out that they were already in the log, of course, and they just don’t like being lit on fire, so they run out of the log. But that was how that myth started. And so I was interested in creating a character that’s like a dragon but also has these roots that are a little bit more ecological or science-y. I have a friend who’s a paleontologist who works a lot with reptiles, and she showed me around the Field Museum in Chicago and pointed out different skull shapes and that kind of thing. So, it’s very helpful to think about the dragon morphology. There are so many cool things that you can do with dragons. I think the more dragons the merrier.

The Last Ember (The Aerimander Chronicles #1) by Lily Berlin Dodd. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $19.99 Nov. 18; ISBN 978-0-3743-9312-0