Have You Seen My Dragon? by Steve Light (review)

The young protagonist of this counting book has lost his dragon and treks all over the city, down by the harbor (“It’s possible he went for a swim”), through the zoo (“Has my dragon been here to visit the monkeys?”), until finally finding the creature at a temple in Chinatown (“There he is! Right where I left him”). Along the way, the boy counts important parts of the landscape (three buses, four sail-boats) from one to twenty. The simple journey and even the counting are merely excuses, however, to take in the lavish cityscapes of the pen and ink illustrations: each spread features detailed black and white drawings using thick and thin nib techniques to achieve a calligraphic effect. The countable elements are washed over with a single colorful pigment, setting them apart for easy picking out. The boy’s bland cartoonishness contrasts strikingly with the whimsical sharp angles and fascinating use of perspective (as with a vertical cutaway of an apartment building where deliverymen have seven boxes or a street view that angles from birds-eye to head-on for eight fire hydrants). The intricate penwork will get lost in busyness if shared with an audience; this is one for poring over, so that youngsters can not only count the color-coded hot dogs, balloons, and subway cars but also spot the dragon sneakily hiding just out of our narrator’s view each step of the way.