Baby Dragon, Baby Dragon!

by Melissa Marr, Lena Podesta (Illustrator)

Overview

A dauntless lass and a hyperactive dragon learn to keep pace with each other as they forge a friendship.

Baby Dragon loves to swoop and soar through the kingdom, which can cause quite a stir. But one little girl is up for the challenge of spending the day with Baby Dragon, and the two embark upon an exciting journey through the kingdom, where they run and race and climb and explore—and eventually even take the time to relish a quiet moment. New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr has crafted a rollicking story about how the best friendships expand our horizons in all kinds of ways!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399175251
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	9.60(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.20(d)
Lexile:	420L (what's this?)
Age Range:	3 - 5 Years

About the Author

Melissa Marr also wrote the picture book Bunny Roo, I Love You. She writes fiction for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have been bestsellers internationally as well as on the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists in the United States. She is best known for the Wicked Lovely series for teens and the Graveminder series for adults. She lives in Arizona with her ever-growing list of children and pets.

Lena Podesta is an illustrator, animator, and story artist, and Baby Dragon, Baby Dragon! is her first picture book. She has worked as an artist in the animation industry on various TV, commercial, and feature film projects. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and sons. You can usually find her there, drawing pictures for kids and grown-ups, in her secret hideout, which is at the bottom of a volcano.

Editorial Reviews

This baby dragon's exuberance can't be contained: he zips through the castle at high speeds, startling people left and right. But one girl is determined to keep up with him. . . . Offers a simple, repetitive prose text that will calm ebullient listeners. Podesta's irresistibly adorable pencil, ink, and gouache illustrations are the highlight, and that rascally dragon is the clear scene-stealer. A bedtime-hour adventure.”—Booklist

From the Publisher

2018-12-05

A bright red baby dragon flies around a village of the European past with a young child chasing after.

Readers first spot the child, cued as a girl with long pigtails, pitching hay into a wagon, but all of a sudden, she is in a castle with a sword at her side. She wears a sleeveless green tunic and gray leggings, and it is hard to tell who she is within the hierarchy of her world. She speaks to the dragon: "Baby dragon, baby dragon, what a fast flight!" Marr uses this admiring, repetitive, rhythmic phrasing throughout the story but lets readers down by following up not with a rhyme but with bland prose text: "Baby dragon, baby dragon, what a big climb! / You scale tall walls and go up so high." The girl clearly enjoys keeping up with the fun-loving dragon, flying on its back, looking at its treasures, and even cuddling up in its nest, but the text is persistently pedestrian. There is a strong sense of movement in the cartoonlike illustrations, created with both traditional and digital media. The child protagonist is light-skinned; some diversity among the kingdom's inhabitants is shown in an amusing feasting scene in which the dragon fastidiously eats with the very tip of its tail, a bib around its neck.

It's good to see an active girl in medieval times, but this dragon story never really soars. (Picture book. 5-7)

Kirkus Reviews