Book 396: Puff, the Magic Dragon

Puff, the Magic Dragon, words by Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton, and illustrations by Eric Puybaret, Sterling Children's Books, 2007.

I reviewed this book for Goodreads a little over a year ago.  Then, this past December, I encountered "Over The Rainbow", also illustrated by Puybaret, and discovered his work all over again.

This is what I said in my original review:

My five-year-old son picked this book out from the library this week, because, you know, there was a dragon on the cover. There was no disc in our copy of the book because it was a library book. I remembered the tune and the refrain to this song, so I started singing it. I didn't remember the last verse, so that caught me off guard. At first I thought that Jackie died, but as I keep singing it was clear that Jackie just grew up and Puff was forgotten. The text, because it is the same as the song, is a downer, but the illustrations at the end are not. The illustrations were colorful, soft and playful -- they had a very dreamlike quality. They suited the text perfectly, even right up until the end, because, even though Jackie grew up and forgot about Puff, he was not abandoned. There are still other children in the world, so at the end of the book was hope, which, of course, is what children are. I did buy this book for my son, last month, and he loves it as much as he did in November 2013.