Wanted: Personal Dragon: Lovabye Dragon by Barbara Joosse

ONCE THERE WAS A GIRL, AN ALL-ALONE GIRL, IN HER OWN LITTLE BED

IN HER OWN LITTLE ROOM

IN HER OWN LITTLE CASTLE

WHO DREAMED OF A DRAGON FOR A FRIEND.

In her loneliness Girl sheds silver tears, a trickle of tears which flow down through the land until they find the cave of a dragon, "snore-sleeping" until he awakes with start--GLUK!

Somehow Dragon knows what those tears mean and follows their silver traces back to the little room in the little castle, where the two are together.

"I FOUND YOU!" ROARED DRAGON.

GIRL WAS LITTLE.  DRAGON BIGGLE.
BUT THEY WERE JUST THE SAME SIZE...
IN THE MIDDLE.

It's a forever friendship made in that middle kingdom of the imagination in Barbara Joose's latest, Lovabye Dragon (Candlewick, 2012). To Joose's Caldecott-winning lyric narrative style, Randy Cecil's stylishly abstracted illustrations, executed in dark blues with a strokes of gold and a dash of humor, add just the right touch of fantasy to this story of an uncommon friendship for a lonely dragon and a very lonely girl.

Joose knows how to use language playfully and poetically, painting her own pictures in the mind, and this story, sweet but never saccharine, belongs with some of her other tales dealing with the nature of love, her Caldecott-winning Mama, Do You Love Me? and her sibling-rivalry-soothing little gem, I Love You the Purplest.Publishers Weekly gives this one a thumbs up and calls it "a lullaby of a book." After all, who wouldn't sleep well with Dragon's tail warmly wrapped around you?