The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters
Written and illustrated by Christoph Niemann
Greenwillow Books; $16.99
40 pp.; ISBN-13: 978-0061577765

Review by Amy Brozio-Andrews

In this innovative picture book, Christoph Niemann (author of The Police Cloud) has created an engaging story innovatively illustrated with Chinese characters superimposed over their representative images, resulting in an accessible and fascinating introduction to Chinese.

Young Lin gets a small dragon as a gift. The pair is inseparable, playing hide and seek, ping pong, and telling stories to each other. Until the day that a game of soccer goes awry though -- a broken vase angers Lin's father, who banishes Lin's dragon to his cage. The next morning, Lin is devastated to find the dragon gone. She immediately sets out to find her friend.

Traveling far and wide, she arrives at a river where a witch disguised as an old woman asks Lin to help her cross the river. Lin does, and is rewarded by the witch helping lift her high above the earth, into the sky; from that vantage point, Lin can see her dragon and is reunited with her beloved friend. Dad comes around and true to picture book-form, they all live contentedly ever after.

In a letter to the reader that opens the book, Christoph Niemann reveals the roots of The Pet Dragon; on a recent trip to Asia, he found that the Chinese characters that he remembered best were the ones that sort of looked like the idea they represented. The book isn't really intended to be a Chinese language primer but more of a gentle introduction and encouragement to learn more.

Niemann does an excellent job of marrying Chinese characters to the images he creates to illustrate the story. Below each illustration, the featured Chinese character is reproduced by itself with its English language meaning. The characters that he chooses to use are fairly intuitive for readers and their parents. For example, the character that looks like a pair of ladders closed at the top means friend, and the character is layered over a picture of Lin and her dragon arm in arm. In another example, the character for tree looks like a cross with two lines coming down diagonally from the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal lines; the woods are represented by two of these characters together, and three together means a forest.

The Pet Dragon is a good introduction to Chinese language and culture for young children and their parents, turning what might seem like an intimidating language (Niemann's letter from the author says that you need to know 3,000-4,000 characters to be considered literate!) into something more accessible and within reach if your child has the interest and the passion to pursue it, wrapped in a rewarding story about a little girl who's willing to climb any mountain and cross any river in search of her very best pal.