A Dragon Used to Live Here

by Annette LeBlanc Cate, Annette LeBlanc Cate (Illustrator)

Overview

Raise the drawbridge for a story-within-a-story melding classic fairy-tale trappings with contemporary, tongue-in-cheek wit, abundantly illustrated in black-and-white—a perfect family read.

Noble children Thomas and Emily have always known their mother to be sensible, the lady of the castle—if anything, a bit boring. But then they discover Meg, a cranky scribe who lives in the castle basement, leading a quirky group of artists in producing party invitations and other missives for the nobles above. Meg claims that she was a friend of their mother’s back when the two were kids—even before the dragon lived in the castle. Wait—a dragon? Not sure they can believe Meg’s tales, the kids return again and again to hear the evolving, fantastical story of their mother’s escapades (while putting their fussiest penmanship to work) and get caught up in a quest to reunite the onetime friends.

Kidnapping, fighting, a ferocious dragon, loyal elves, and true love . . . coupled with squabbling siblings, archery practice gone amiss, and ill-fated dives into the moat . . . This multilayered story blends adventure and humor, medieval tropes and modern sensibility, in a satisfying read for the whole family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536224450
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	79 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	6 - 9 Years

About the Author

Annette LeBlanc Cate is the author-illustrator of The Magic Rabbit and Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard, a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

In elementary school, I was famous for being the girl who would draw horses for all the other girls. While this didn’t exactly help my popularity level in high school, it did actually help me a lot in becoming an illustrator, because you have to draw stuff for people all the time. Drawing stuff for people is great. Even better is when you get to draw stuff for yourself, exactly how you want it. That’s what happens when you write your own stories and draw pictures to go with them, when you create your own world in a book. That’s the most wonderful fun of all, and I’m so delighted I get to do that for Candlewick!

Three Things You Might Not Know About Me:

1. I have also illustrated for magazines like Cobblestone and Cricket and Spider. And I am in Appleseeds magazine every month.

2. I was the art director for an animated show called Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist in the ‘90s... I really liked it, but I had to be the boss of a lot of artists (including my little sister!) and I think I am not necessarily the kind of person who should be the boss of artists. I like just being the boss of myself now.

3. Even though I wrote a book about birds and I love to watch them, I don’t feed them because once I accidentally lured a bear right up to my back door! (Bears love birdseed.) I still live in Massachusetts, now in a very small town with lots of birds and all sorts of critters (including bears), with my husband, Bob, and my two sons, Dave and James.

Editorial Reviews

Clever, multistranded, and off the charts in read-aloud potential.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Telling stories within a story, Cate’s narrative merges traditional fantasy elements with a more modern, conversational tone. . . . many readers will enjoy the understated wit. . . Spirited drawings bring the settings and engaging characters to life in this very readable chapter book.
—Booklist

Light-hearted and fun. . . Frequent ink illustrations look as though they were sketched by the quirky scribes themselves. . . Listening to an elder tell a potentially embellished tale will ring true for many, and the heartwarming resolution between two old friends is the icing on the lemon scone.
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

A story of fantastical beasts that focuses on themes of hard work, determination, and friendship. . . . This adorable mad-cap fantasy will keep readers interested and curious to know what happens next. . . . a great read-aloud that would be enjoyed by all and a must-have for any elementary school library collection.
—School Library Connection

A sparkling chapter book. . . Ingeniously layered, yet infused with a feeling of lively informality. . . Ms. Cate has an admirably playful way of introducing esoteric words into the story so that children will understand them. . . Humorous ink illustrations by the author add buoyancy to this engaging read-aloud.
—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

★ 2022-03-16
The winding tale skeptical Thomas and his pesky but acute little sister, Emily, tease out of crusty Meg McThorn, supervisor of the castle scriptorium, includes a fire-breathing dragon, knights, wee folk, and the possibility of hidden treasure—and so seems hard to believe.

However, as Meg tartly asserts, it’s not a “Once upon a time” thing but “a completely true story, with real people I actually know.” But was the siblings’ mother really once the dragon’s captive—until she helped their father “rescue” her? Are there crocodiles in the moat? And gryphons and tricksy pixies in the nearby woods? Tucking scores of cozy, crosshatched sketches into her short chapters as well as sly literary winks in the form of ironic banter and sibling squabbles (Emily, despite being only 9, nearly always comes out on top), Cate nets readers in a web of story as deftly as Meg nets her own audience of two. As past becomes prologue to what happens after the children have adventures of their own, and their noble parents finally come back from, as Thomas puts it, “a stuffy conference about moldy old books and scrolls and manuscripts written in languages no one speaks anymore,” Meg’s yarn turns out to be verifiably true…or mostly. The female contingent leads the all-White cast, but the boys and men put on decent enough showings, and despite occasional fraught turns, no one, draconic or otherwise, ends up slain.

Clever, multistranded, and off the charts in read-aloud potential. (Fantasy. 8-11)

Kirkus Reviews