City of Speed (Battle Dragons #2)

Overview

The second entry in Alex London's Battle Dragons series continues its fantasy vision of a city organized around competitive dragon racing, where riders and their dragons form crews that double as families of choice. The series leans into fast-paced, illustrated storytelling aimed at younger readers, following a protagonist navigating both the mechanics of racing and the social pressures of belonging to a crew.

As with the first book in the series, the story is less about grand battles than about the everyday stakes of growing up inside a subculture with its own rules, hierarchies, and codes of loyalty. Dragons here function as both companions and symbols of status, and the racing scenes give London room to build tension through speed and competition rather than traditional combat.

The sequel format suggests an emphasis on continuity: characters and relationships established earlier deepen, and the world of the city's dragon-racing gangs comes into sharper focus, likely raising the stakes for the protagonist's place within it.

Themes and Context

Alex London has built a career writing across middle-grade and young-adult fiction, often returning to outsider protagonists who find belonging in unconventional communities. The Battle Dragons series fits that pattern, using the framework of racing gangs to explore ideas of chosen family, rivalry, and the tension between individual ambition and group loyalty — themes accessible to younger readers through an adventure-fantasy lens rather than direct social commentary.

The series also reflects a broader trend in middle-grade publishing toward heavily illustrated, series-driven fantasy that borrows structural elements from gang or crew narratives — a hierarchy to climb, turf to defend, loyalty to earn — while keeping the tone appropriate for younger audiences. This makes the book part of a recognizable genre conversation about how much of that "underworld" framing can appear in books for children before it draws scrutiny from parents and educators.

Why City of Speed (Battle Dragons #2) Has Been Challenged

Objections to the Battle Dragons series have generally centered on its gang-like framing of dragon-racing crews, with some readers and parents expressing concern that the crew rivalries, territorial stakes, and hierarchy depicted in the books normalize gang structures and behavior for a middle-grade audience, even when translated into a fantasy setting. Concerns about age-appropriateness of the racing and rivalry violence, however stylized, have also been raised in review requests. This title has been challenged or restricted in 1 state and 1 school district tracked in this catalog.