Leo is a very brave knight battling a different kind of dragon—his foes attack him from the inside where he cannot hide from them. He has a lot of people willing to help him, and several do their best, but this is a fight that Leo has to do on his own—so he musters up the courage and the confidence to get the job done with their support.

Gilli B is absolutely the right illustrator for this book! Her style brought it to life—I love her depiction of Lightning Dragons, I doubt that's the approach many artists would've taken with them. Her chimerical pictures capture the spirit of the book beyond those, too. Delightful work.

If you've read anything about this book, you know how hard it would be to saying anything that's not positive about the book (and if you haven't, click here.). But I'm going to—it's too short. I'm not looking for much, but we need a little more—just a couple of pages. There wouldn't even need to be much text, some illustrations might do the trick. Leo's got a tough battle to fight, and it's over a bit too quickly, which makes it seem too easy. And there's no way that Leo's Lightning Dragons (fictional or not) are easily vanquished. How White can accomplish that without running afoul of the book's overwhelming positivity, I'm not sure. I just think the subject deserves it.

Do the pluses outweigh my criticism? Oh yes. It's a great book and I'm so glad I read it. The rhymes are cute, the story is very positive, great illustrations and the imagery of the Lightning Dragon fighting inside Leo is a great way to get the idea of epilepsy across to a picture book reader. A good story that should provide a springboard for a discussion with children about this condition and how hard it has to be for people to deal with. This is definitely one to pick up for your young reader.

My thanks to Love Books Group for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials they provided.

Humour is a hit or miss thing. This one missed for me by a long way.

The first hour is a (long, long, can she STILL be talking about this?) lament about the state of this middle-class white woman's life.

She's 39 (how terrible is that), is married to a man who no longer excites her (or really sees her), has a part-time job that bores her, has young children that she can neither support nor control and has to face the coven of yummy mummies at the school gate who are mean to her. Faced with this deep angst, she responds with snidey wit, ineffective longing and diving into alcohol each evening.

I can see this could be sad in that special-problems-only-middle-class-people-have sort of way but I don't see it as funny.

Maybe what I hear as the not-grown-up-yet, I-was-meant-to-be-special lament of a middle-aged middle-class woman is really a poignant crie de coeur from a desperate woman, fending off existential panic with humour. 

If it is, I don't care.

This is not a woman I want to spend another ten hours listening to.

So, into the Life's Too Short box it goes and I look for another book for the Festus Door.

I'm reading this for the Festivus Door ( I couldn't find the image).

This is an absolutely gorgeous book! I love the illustrations added to the original story. 

Such a beautiful book. This is my go to book for Cryptozoologist and I found this gorgeous new illustrated one that I had not read before. I know the story is pretty much the same, but the gorgeous art brings so much life to the beasts.