Pillage is a YA fantasy novel series by Obert Skye, and is his second series after the Leven Thumps series. It involves A Boy And His Dragons, but it is notable for Deconstruction a lot of the tropes involved wherein someone finds a dragon egg.
Beck Phillips has lived all his life with a slightly-ill mother who insists on moving around a lot. He's having a fairly ordinary day at one of his many, many schools, crawling through the vents to plant a bee bomb (as you do when you're bound to leave the school in a month anyway), when he gets called away to the principal's office for non-prank related reasons. At which point he receives some rather grim news: His mother is dead. Dead dead. She finally succumbed to her illness. Beck barely has time to recover before he learns that he's being sent to live with his immensely rich uncle. Thus, he gets shipped off to the eerie, fog-shrouded mountain town of Kingsplot, where everything seems a century or two out of date. The fog isn't helped by the fact that his uncle is a crazy recluse who never leaves top dome of his vast mansion.
His uncle's servants give him the run of the mansion, but with a few caveats: Stay out of the locked rooms, and stay out of the walled garden. But rules were made to be disobeyed, and with the help of his new local friends, Beck sneaks around the mansion (to find an old diary, that makes several mentions of a curse and an old family legend about dragons) and into the garden (to find a dusty shed full of roundish stones). Not surprisingly, the "stones" turn out to be dragon eggs, which promptly hatch into six mewling, hungry baby dragons.
This turns out to be a very bad thing. Dragons, as it turns out, are very dangerous, hard-to-control creatures, and three kids were not cut out for the job. To make things worse, they have thirst for destruction... and stealing. If left unchecked, the dragons will utterly destroy the town in their quest for valuable items, which they desire to bring back to their "master"—Beck. And the only way to check them? Stabbing them in the throat. Not to mention, Beck may have an old enemy who wants to make use of the dragons for himself.
Beck just can't learn to stay away from dragons, however, and thus, his adventures continue...
After the first book, two years later came the second book, Choke, in 2010. Then in 2012 arrived the third and final book to the trilogy, Ambush.
This series contains examples of:
- Anti-Hero: Beck
- Beauty Is Bad: The queen dragon from the second book. Since the minute after she was born, Beck and Kate instantly thought she was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. She was even kind of nice towards Beck... At least until she grew up...
- Big Bad: The magician that cursed the family in the first book
- Big Bad Friend: Who would have known that Milo was actually the magician in disguise that whole entire time!?
- Big Eater: The dragons. Especially, Lizzy.
- Breath Weapon: As one can expect, the dragons are able to breath fire.
- Casanova Wannabe: Wyatt, as shown in the second and third book. He's always annoying his friends about how much of a Chick Magnet he is. Even though there's no girls to prove him right.
- Cursed with Awesome: Although they cause lots of destruction, Beck does indeed love the curse placed on him to hatch dragons.
- Blessed with Suck: However, the fates of the men of the Pillage family die by the dragons, while the women of the family go insane.
- Deadpan Snarker: Beck and Kate. Their snarky behavior had been mentioned a couple times by other characters.
- Egg MacGuffin: A whole bunch of them in the shed.
- Fiery Red Head: Averted with Kate most of the time.
- Forbidden Fruit: Beck gets told explicitly by the staff not to go into the garden. Of course it's the first place he tries to get into.
- Forced Kiss: Beck does this to Kate before he goes and fights the dragons in the first book.
- Greed
- Green Thumb: Beck can make plants grow and seemingly communicate with them, which is actually essential to hatching the dragons.
- Heel–Face Turn: Wyatt, who becomes part of the trio in the second book.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Beck's uncle is really his dad, and his mother was really his aunt.
- Immune to Bullets: The dragons. They each only have one weakness (and it's not guns).
- Killed Off for Real: In the first book we have Beck's mom and the magician.
- Love Triangle: Beck sees this between Kate and Lizzy (yes, the dragon)towards him at first.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Anytime a Pillage hatches a dragon.
- Our Dragons Are Different: They need special plants to grow around them to hatch, they have short lifespans, they create new eggs when they die, and they were created to be a curse on Beck's family.
- Slasher Smile: The queen dragon, Lizzy, does this before attacking Beck in the second book.
- Supreme Chef: The mansion chef, of course.
- Two Guys and a Girl: Beck's friend makeup.
