Nellie and the Dragon

Nellie's Dad buys a job lot of charcoal for the barbecue -- 'because it's there'. Surprise--Nellie finds a Dragon asleep in the shed. It's been asleep for 20 years so it has woken up hungry: food? You've guessed -- the charcoal. From the first five pages this is a predictable collection of mundane stories which the device of the Dragon fails to lift onto a different plane. The Dragon is the perpetrator of various petty and nonsensical crimes but is very difficult to apprehend because only those who believe in dragons can actually see him. Nellie's claims to have seen the Dragon are dismissed as childish fancy. Each of the ten chapters tells a separate story. In all this is a depressing little book. Each episode plods on at a monotonous pace, the gloom being quite unrelieved by interesting characters or events. Thank goodness there are the David Henry Wilsons of this world - to prove that stories for young readers need not be pedestrian although treating everyday experience.