PreS-Gr 2—Max sees a huge egg in the library and watches as a dragon hatches, grows, and begins to eat the books. "The dragon opened his mouth and began to munch./He filled his tummy with books. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch." As the creature gets bigger and bigger, the worried boy warns everyone—the children's librarian, his parents, the head librarian, and his teacher—with no success: "There's a dragon in the library, speckled and green. He's a hungry thing! He's an eating machine!" Finally, when it has become enormous, Max goes outside and finds a policeman and they discover that the library has disappeared—inside the dragon. The story concludes with a list of "Max's Book Care Tips," which are good, sensible rules, along with the last two—"Books are for reading, not for eating" and "Never leave a book unsupervised near a dragon." The final endpaper shows Max and the dragon standing in front of a new library with the creature holding a half-filled basket of books with a "donate" sign on it—but whether the contents are for the library or the dragon is not quite clear. Although the format and colorful watercolor and ink illustrations are rather mundane, they convey the humor of the story, which will hold great appeal for dragon storytimes because of the text's catchy repetitious refrains. Dragon books are currently in vogue, and there aren't many that are easy enough for preschoolers. This one will fit the bill—Judith Constantinides, formerly at East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library, LA
Max believes "there's a dragon in the library, speckled and green. He's a hungry thing! He's an eating machine." Max tries to tell everyone, including his mother, his father, the head librarian, and even the police, but no one believes him. Accompanied by awkward watercolor illustrations, this purposeful tale created for library story hours is well intentioned but falls flat.
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