Happy Birthday, Good Knight

My four year old girl has been enamored with dragons for a couple of years, and has lately gotten very interested in knights, castles, etc. I quickly found that there is very little out there that is appropriate for smaller children, on the subject of knights. Either the information is too complex, or more likely, too gruesome for my taste. When I discovered this sweet series, I immediately wanted all of them. I really like the way the verses flow and how the author repeats the action over and over. The editorial reviews did a great job of describing the book, so I won't go into detail here, but I will say that I think any child can relate to wanting to buy someone special a gift, or make one, and how difficult that can be. This book shows how meaningful that desire is and when the knight embraces the experience and says that the laughter provided by their efforts was a wonderful gift, my little one beamed. These are just fun books. I'm glad my library has them, but we are buying them too, so we can read them whenever we want! It is a refreshing angle to the knight and dragon relationship. Nearly everything else I found was adversarial, and since we love dragons, I was sorry about that. If you have a child who loves knights and dragons, also check out Tomie Paola's The Knight and the Dragon, about a knight reading up on how to fight dragons and a dragon reading up on how to fight knights. The "fight" is hilarious and the end has a clever twist that delighted my child and me too! The Reluctant dragon, by Kenneth Grahame, is either for an older child who can read, or a great read aloud that my four year old enjoyed, and there is a neat old Disney movie based on this book. We loved this too.

We've been enjoying this series starting with Good Night, Good Knight and this is another good one but not our favorite (the other 3 are a little better: Good Night, GK, Get Well, GK, and Take Care, GK). The Little Dragons try to make a special birthday for the Knight but with predictably messy results. She found the story silly and fun. We would recommend all of the Good Knight books