Picked this up at The Book Thing in Baltimore, Maryland.

I am taking this on my trip to Amsterdam to attend the 2010 BookCrossing Convention. If I finish it before I return, I will leave it there and post any review and release notes when I get home.

Melydia and I often shared books on our trip to and from the 2010 BookCrossing Convention in Amsterdam. She read this book first and then told me that it was not about dragons as much as she had expected but instead about squirrels?

All that being said I was a bit desperate for things to read on the airplane coming home and I decided to read this one. It was a fun and easy to read book that did not take me long at all to finish. The childlike way it was written was part of the charm and I enjoyed it even though it was not as I expected it would be.

This is a book that I think young readers of chapter books will really enjoy and I look forward to seeing the future travels of this book.



This book was read for the 2010 Pages Read Challenge from the release challenge forum.

My goal is 40,000 pages and this book has a total of 352 pages that I am counting for this challenge. I have a total of 36 books read this year with 8297 pages read for the year and that is 20.743% of my 2010 goal.



This book was released for the 2010 Keep Them Moving Challenge from the release challenge forum.

This is release #12 for this challenge.

David rents a room with a somewhat eccentric potter and her young daughter who is obsessed with squirrels. The back of this book talks about dragons at great length, but there's far more about squirrels than dragons in this brief novel. Which is fine, since I like squirrels. The dragons in question - small ceramic creations that made me think of Pocket Dragons - were pretty predictable, but charming nonetheless. I wonder if the subsequent books in this series explain why all the dragons had names that started with G. Anyway, I'm rambling. In short, this would be a nice book for a younger reader. I found it to be pretty generic overall.

As you might have guessed, I didn't finish reading this while in Amsterdam, but rather on the flight home, so I'll release it somewhere more local.

I don't know where this book is, but it's no longer in my possession.

I've got this one now. I picked it up at a recent BCinDC meetup, after melydia said she didn't have it anymore. I'm guessing that means another member had it in between.

This is an entertaining though curious book. The cover makes it look as if it's going to be about dragons. There are some little dragon figurines in it, which have special qualities that the reader will figure out the first time the creatures are introduced and then spend the next 100 pages wondering why the protagonist hasn't caught on yet. But most of the book isn't really about dragons. It's about squirrels. I'm OK with that. I like squirrels too.

My biggest problem here is that the author didn't understand his market. The book is marketed as YA, but the story is way too simplistic for YA. Teens are going to have the same trouble I did with figuring out what's so special about the dragons long before the character does and then rolling their eyes at how dense he is. And overall, it's too tame and "sweet" in tone for a YA audience. I'd have toned down the reading level, shortened it, and aimed it at middle-grade readers instead.

On the counter in the front window.