Being Friends with Dragons: 04/19/22

Being Friends with Dragons by Katherine Locke and Diane Ewen (Illustrations) is an instructional manual on how to be friends with dragons. More broadly it's a metaphor for being friends with people who are different than you or possibly neurodivergent.

The first third of the book introduces dragons and all the ways they are good friends. There's lot of examples of what they're good at: hide and seek, making s'mores, and certain things at the playground.

Then it moves on to how they sometimes forget to be good friends. They might get too interested in popping balloons, they blow fire when upset, they can make thunder storms (a useful skill for drought riddled California!), and other loud potentially unfriendly things.

The book ends with an entreaty to the human friends to be patient with their dragons. There's advice on how to help them calm down. First though it works on the empathy of the human friend by showing how they might act out when being snubbed by their dragon friends. Looks pretty similar — doesn't it? That's the point. People and dragons have their bad, grumpy moments.

It's a cute book and since dragons could be stand ins for anyone, it could be used to teach children empathy for other groups of people. Or maybe to teach empathy to their adults relatives. Children, I've found, are usually far more flexible than adults.

Five stars

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