Dragonhaven

By Robin McKinley

Are books about a child and his/her dragon a recognised sub-genre yet? I think the probably are, from the late Anne McCaffery, to training, to sparkly dragonnets who're best friends with princesses. Not to mention at least two iterations in American comics.
This is largely of the same genre, but instead of being fairy tales, the setting is a terribly 'realistic' world full of cyrptozoology. Nessie exists, and following the discovery of a Norwegian community of fjord monsters, scientists are optimistic about a breeding programme. There are griffons and giant Caspian walrus, and of course, given the title, dragons.
Quite a number of draconic creatures in fact, but only the one type of true, huge, flying, fire-breathing kind, and they're on the verge of extinction, surviving only in Kenya, central Australia and the Dakotas.
The human-dragon relationship is a tad fraught. There is, it must be said, surprisingly little evidence that these gigantic, fire breathing predators have ever attacked a human (save for when the Aussies were trying to exterminate them, which is an extenuating circumstance if ever I heard one) and no-one's really sure how many there are, but its obvious that they could eat anything they want, so people are naturally scared. There's a fence, of unknown (to the narrator) mechanism which seems to confine the scaly beasts inside their national park, or perhaps keep unsupervised people from bothering the endangered animals. There are park rangers, largely drawn from a local indian tribe who seem to know more than they let on. There is the harassed park administrator, recently widowed, and his son Jake, who expects to become a ranger when he grows up.
To be a ranger requires that you can cope all by yourself in the wilderness, a coming of age ritual if you like, and while doing so Jake discovers a dead poacher, killed by a dragon he had mortally wounded, and the dragon's dead or dying offspring. Intervening in such things is thoroughly not done (illegal even as it turns out) but Jake saves the one surviving dragonlet, and with the help of his father and the Indian rangers, raises her.
Dragonlets are fairly helpless things, it seems that dragons are quite similar to marsupials - barely formed bloblike infants, pouches and so on, so it's a big job. Eventually though contact with the other dragons is established, proof that they are intelligent and telepathic is gained and everybody lives happily ever after. There's a bit of a crisis with the parents of the poacher, who stir up the public fears of big aggressive child killing reptiles in an attempt to get the park shut down, but Jake being caught on camera being friendly with them defuses that.
The whole thing is Jakes narrative, and because of the secrecy in which he's raising his dragon he doesn't get much exposure to the politics. Or the intriguing Caspian walrus. Alas, he does waffle. There's an awful lot of exposition, which sets up the authorial voice, conflicts with other park staff, pages and pages about cleaning out the cages of the minor dragonoids at the park visitors centre. A good 20% of the book after the big climactic reveal which is more about Jake's marriage than about the changed world.
Good core story, but over long.