Enter a fascinating, ornately drawn cityscape and help a boy find his dragon while counting objects from hot dogs to traffic lights.
In the heart of the city, among the taxis and towers, a small boy travels uptown and down, searching for his friend. Readers will certainly spot the glorious beast, plus an array of big-city icons they can count. Is the dragon taking the crosstown bus, or breathing his fiery breath below a busy street? Maybe he took a taxi to the zoo or is playing with the dogs in the park. Steve Light’s masterful pen-and-ink illustrations, decorated with meticulous splashes of color, elevate this counting book (numbers 1–20) to new heights. Maybe the dragon is up there, too!
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
48 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Good Bonding Experience
By C. Curran
This is a story about a boy who goes in search for a dragon that he has lost. The pictures are all drawn in ink so the majority of the book is in black in white, just like the cover of the book suggests. When you open the book you will see that the pictures and story takes up both the left and right side of the book. For example, the first page is a picture of a green dragon that starts on the left side of the book and continues on the right side, and this is the format throughout the book.As I said, it is a mostly black and white book. The only color in the book are the objects that need to be counted. Below I will give some examples of what I am talking about. Keep in mind I am NOT going to mention what is in the background of the picture, it would be too much to explain, just know that there is a background picture that is in pen and ink. Very well done illustrations may I add.On the first two pages is a picture of one green dragon. A boy is asking a man, "Have you seen my dragon?" The man replies, "No? I will look for him.On the second two pages the boy is at a hot dog stand and there are two brown hot dogs, one on each side of the page. The words are, "Maybe he got hungry and stopped for a hot dog."On the next pages are three purple buses. The words are, "Or perhaps he went downtown on the bus."Then the next one would be 4 blue sail boats and the words are, " It's possible he went for a swim."Other colored pictures, with words, for a child to find are, 5 water towers, 6 monkeys, 7 boxes, 8 fire hydrants, 9 books, 10 paint cans,11 manhole covers, 12 pigeons, 13 ice cream cones, 14 dogs, 15 balloons, 16 subway cars, 17 taxis, 18 bicycles, 19 green lights, and 20 laterns. The last page of the book the boy finally finds his dragon, in China Town. The last line reads, "There he is? Right where I left him."I want to mention that the pictures are very easy to find, it's not a "Where's Waldo" type of book. So it's good for a young child just learning to count and not neccessarily for a child who already knows how to count.I gave it four stars because I tend to buy books that are very colorful. This is just a personal preference. Still I thought it was great to sit with a child while they pointed and counted to what was on the page. Nice bonding experience.Thank you for taking the time to read my review, I sincerey hope it helped you. If you find my review helpful please let Amazon know by clicking on the "Yes" button below. And many hours of happy reading together with you and a child, whoever that child my be.
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
AMAZING illustrations!!
By Eric J. Van Raepenbusch
I waited months to get my hands on this book!Upon opening the package I was stunned with how beautiful it was; green foil lettering for the title and the dragon on the front cover, pen and ink illustrations with highlights of color on each page, and take off the dust jacket to see more (the black on green is just awesome!).First, I read the book by myself (three times!). There is so much to look at in the illustrations, so many details. I loved the maps on the endpapers! Then, I read it to my six-year-old and three-year-old sons. They loved counting the items, and finding the dragon and the boy on each page. They got more involved as we got deeper into the book -- they wanted to count all the items all the way to 20!I was not disappointed with this book! It was everything I expected and more!
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.Hidden in plain sight
By E. R. Bird
When I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan I would get this little thrill every time my city appeared in a children’s book. Which is to say, every time it was mentioned in Horton Hatches the Egg. Honestly, for all that it had a cool name it really didn’t come up anywhere else. New York kids must be rather jaded in this regard. Anytime a city book is set somewhere other than Manhattan or Brooklyn, they probably scratch their little heads in confusion (I can attest to this personally as my two-year-old calls any and all cities she sees in books “New York City” and will not be corrected). As a NYC transplant I’d probably mind this more if it weren’t for the fact that so many of these books are so doggone splendid. Take Steve Light’s latest, Have You Seen My Dragon? A riot of miniscule details, numbers, colors, familiar city elements, and a magnificent, fantastic creature always hidden in plain sight, Light gives us a city dragon worth remembering long after the pages are turned.You would think it would be difficult to mislay a dragon. You would be wrong. When our story begins a young boy is asking a doorman whether or not he’s seen his dragon. “No? I will look for him.” Never you mind that if the boy merely turned his head 90 degrees to the left he’d see his ginormous pet sniffing an understandably wary pup. From here it’s a race across the city. Everywhere the boy goes the numbers go up. The dragon perches atop a hot dog stand where they are selling “2 Hot dogs”. It peers down from a roof at the “3 Buses” below. It gets a quick drink from one of the “5 Water towers.” On the endpapers you can see the circuitous path the dragon takes through a slightly compacted lower Manhattan until, at last, the boy spots him in Chinatown, smiling widely from between the “20 Lanterns”.There is a perception out there that it is near impossible to publish a black and white picture book in today’s market. This may be so, but Light comes pretty darn close to doing so. Though there is a different color for every number in the book, most of what you’re seeing is just good old-fashioned pen and inks. More to the point, the man has gone rather wild in his details. I haven’t seen intricate work at this level since I read Mark Alan Stamaty’s picture book cult classic Who Needs Donuts Whether he’s detailing the myriad wires that curl around the sewer pipes below the street or paying homage to the detailing on St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there’s a method to the man’s madness. Now add in the fact that Light isn’t afraid to go vertical with his two-page spreads and that he occasionally gets incredibly creative with his perspective (the “8 Fire hydrants” two-page spread is an exercise in internal logic) and you have a rather beautiful affair. Little wonder that he chose to only dot the pages with color. It’s lovely to watch how the artist uses these colors to direct your eye across the page.If the name “Steve Light” has been triggering some kind of latent amnesia in your cranium, it probably has to do with his board books with Chronicle Books. Let me tell you right now that if you have not read Trucks Go, Trains Go or Diggers Go aloud to a small child then your life, nice as it is, is little more than a pale hollow shell of what it might someday be. In those three books Light used bright, thick paints to convey an array of vehicles. He then gave each and every one of them original, amazing sounds, ideal of reading aloud either one-on-one or to a large group. Have You Seen My Dragon differs widely from that series in terms of look and feel. But what it does have in common is the age of the audience (toddler heaven is what we have going on here) and the read aloud potential. Good readalouds are rarities. For every 100 picture books published in a given season, maybe four of them are titles you’d like to test on a group of squirmy squirmers. And this, ladies and gentlemen, should be one of those four. It’s simple and interactive and I can already hear a room of small fry screaming at you as to where the dragon is “hiding”.There may be the occasional New York child that complains that the buses in the book are purple when, in fact, our buses are no such of a thing. Meh. I say purple buses would be a heckuva lot more fun, so if Mr. Light wants to bestow that particular hue to them, let him. And that goes for the blue subway cars as well. Slightly more problematic are the “monkeys”. You will find that for the number 6 one is supposed to find “6 Monkeys”. The zoo picture is, if you follow the map, sort of supposed to be the Central Park Zoo, but it doesn’t really resemble it. That’s okay too. Artistic liberties I am a-okay with. Far more of a problem is the fact that the monkeys in question have no tails. Yup, what we’re dealing with here is a page of six apes. It’s a classic Curious George problem and not one that sinks the book or anything. Still, wouldn’t mind a tail or two on those primates. It would be just the thing.All told, I see a lot of New York City picture books in a given year. This one goes beyond our city’s borders. It’s the kind of book that’s going to appeal to any kid that’s drawn to the hustle and bustle of a metropolitan area. The words “New York City” never even appear in the text, allowing a lot of young readers to simply think of the location as an everycity. Lithe and lovely, overflowing with good will and copious details, expect the sentence, “Have you seen ‘Have You Seen My Dragon?’” to appear on the lips of parents and children everywhere. Because if you haven’t seen it, now’s the time.For ages 2-6.
