When the idea for Bookish began to take shape in my mind, I had a sudden vision of myself studying an old map emblazoned with the legend “Here be dragons”: an adventure ahead! And so I knew I’d have to seek out good books about dragons for this first issue. I'm adding some of those same books to The Little Bookroom.
I chose not to include fairy tales and folk tales from the oral tradition, both because I had an obscure feeling that trying to examine those stories side-by-side with modern fiction would be awkward, and because I wondered how modern authors would deal with dragons.
Having spent the better part of the month reading about dragons, I can say that some curious patterns emerge. First, in the case of books for preschool children, dragons live in the time of knights and castles. These dragons are generally peaceable creatures, even cowardly ones, who are therefore roused to action only when necessary, and only on the side of justice. Sometimes they turn out not to exist at all, but to threaten only in the imaginations of children bold enough to confront their fears.
In the case of books for children of about six and up, books featuring dragons are set either in the remote, mythical past or solidly in the present. Long-ago dragons are real creatures of flesh and blood, most of them large, fierce and dangerous. A handful are utterly uninterested in pursuing the chivalric life, and seek to preserve the public appearance of savagery only as a means of ensuring their greater privacy. In either case, these dragons draw communities together, allowing them to articulate their values to themselves, values of wit, loyalty or courage. Present-day dragons, by contrast, are invisible or in hiding or stranded in time. They need the help of children to return to safety or to sleep. These modern dragons typically represent hidden forces and feelings—anger, fear, insecurity—and children in these books are empowered to act authoritatively, since adults don’t even see the problem.
To my surprise, the gender politics of books about dragons remain remarkably retrograde; if anything, the numbers and significance of girls and women in these stories have diminished over time. Among the best books for preschoolers are depictions of boy knights engaged in derring-do, who reconsider the wisdom of their actions or succumb to their very natural fears, and of girl princesses requiring rescue—though there is also a wonderfully brave girl who confronts her fears, in There’s a Dragon Downstairs. But at the early elementary level, I found literally not one book I liked that had a female protagonist. This lack tends to persist in books at the later elementary level, though not so absolutely, as here there are girls and women who use their wits to defeat both dragons and men—see The Dragon of Og. The books I found worthy of recommendation are truly all wonderful, but the absence of girls in these stories is extremely odd, to say the least, and all the more so as books about dragons for readers 11 and up feature girls prominently. So if you know readers of this age, you should certainly look for books by Patricia Wrede, Susan Fletcher, and Anne McCaffrey.
Now, what interest do babies and toddlers have in these grand themes? None whatsoever! So the reviews for the youngest children focus on books that play with some of the issues at the heart of the modern dragon books for older children—namely, hiding and finding.
Pat the Bunny. By Dorothy Kunhardt. New York: Golden Books, 1940. You may already own this book, but if not, you must find it for your baby. Often the first book a child receives, Pat the Bunny is perfect for babies, who love to pat the soft bunny, to feel Daddy’s scratchy face, to play peek-a-boo with brother Paul, to read sister Judy’s book, to smell the flowers, to put their fingers in Mommy’s ring, to look at themselves in the mirror, and to wave bye-bye. It is a profoundly exciting reading experience for most babies of six months and up—peek-a-boo with Paul in particular is something they return to again and again. Unfortunately, the edition currently available has an excessively fragile binding that will not stand up to the eager readings of most children, so you may need to find a second copy along the way. If you read this as a young child, you’ll notice that the scent of the flowers has changed, too.