THE DRAGON WHO WANTED TO FLY

An innovative book--Comanor's first--with a little bit of everything: sympathetic characters, a happy ending, inventive pictures and design. When a condor carries him off to the Far Country, Fedge the dragon is determined to fly home, but since he has no wings, must try other methods--and succeeds with helium balloons. A tongue-in-cheek introduction marks the book as ""homemade,"" and its appearance supports that premise, except that homemade does not mean amateurish. Although the hand-lettered text has large, uneven letters, and the lines are broken in awkward places--like something a child would write--the words flow beautifully, constantly interacting with the illustrations (pausing for a picture) and with readers (posing a question). The illustrations look like they were drawn on unlined loose-leaf paper. The scenes consist of a few squiggles in pen, smeared with watercolors and surprisingly expressive; they'd hardly hold up the story by themselves, but the way they're framed--notebook paper on top of colored pages that look like a stack of construction paper when the book is closed--gives them an unexpected elegance. Comanor synthesizes simple elements and likable characters into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.