Dragonwings Themes

Obliged to make a home away from home in America, Moon Shadow's survival and adaptability depends not only on his father but on the friends that they make along the way. As we come to see with the...

Moon Shadow's dream at the beginning of Dragonwings is to meet his father and have a more coherent family. His parents live on different continents, and Moon Shadow has never met his dad. As explor...

You might have noticed in Dragonwings that there's a lot of moving around in Moon Shadow's life, which also means that his home space is constantly shifting and resettling. Could it be that this un...

Dragonwings is bursting with the hopes that each of the characters hold. Some characters help one another with dreams, like Moon Shadow's devoted faith in his father, and some characters have dream...

Moon Shadow is a Chinese immigrant to America in the beginning of the twentieth, a time during which a legalized sort of racism and discrimination was going down in American history. Significantly,...

Dragonwings is a story about Moon Shadow's experience adapting to the new circumstances of life in America. One important question the book puts forth is, how can a person find a sense of belonging...

In Dragonwings, to believe in Windrider's dream of flight is, to a certain degree, to believe in the supernatural. And if we put ourselves in the shoes of Uncle Bright Star in 1903, for example, we...

There's a lot to be afraid of in this book. We experience everything from mean, prejudiced kids throwing garbage at our protagonist to an earthquake ripping apart San Francisco. Dragonwings asks us...

The characters in Dragonwings demonstrate their sense of principles by helping others. Moon Shadow, for example, is an extremely disciplined kid who consistently looks out for his dad's best intere...