The Trouble with Dragons is an fun picture book that tells the story of how the dragons destroyed the environment. The dragons overpopulate, chop down forests, make holes in the atmosphere, and just create a generally unhappy place to live in. The text throughout the story is written in rhyme, which is fun and helps the story to flow well, especially when reading it out loud to children. The author also spaces and places the text in interesting ways that help the story. For example, the line "smallest of mice" has a smaller font than "biggest of elephants" and the word "alone" gets its own page.The story itself is not that great. It is not subtle at all in its environmental message, and is quite dark at the end. The dragons end up all dying at the end of the book because of how careless they were with the environment. I would have preferred if the dragons were able to clean up the earth and survive, but instead they just died. The message of the book would have been more powerful too for children if there was hope for a happy ending. Debi Gliori's illustrations help make up for the poor story, however. Her drawings of dragons are cute and colorful, and give the book a much happier feel. I really liked the amount of detail and how whimsically the dragons were drawn. This would be an excellent book for children who cannot read, because the pictures are phenomenal, while the story is not very good. I feel like Gliori makes a much better illustrator than author. The trouble with dragons is a wonderful book that informs children about the environment through a fun way. The main characters would have to be all the dragons and the setting is the entire world. The point of view is from a narrator. The story explains that dragons keep multiplying until they consume the whole world. Because there is so many of them, the world starts to deteriorate. So finally, after the world is almost underwater, the dragons decide that they will keep everything under control so they can live with the rest of the world. The main ideas I got from this book is friendship and the environment. I really liked how nature and protecting the environment was implied throughout the story. In order to keep our earth protected we need to work together.
What do You think about The Trouble With Dragons (2008)?
Nice story to open discussion about taking care of earth.
—ashley
