Dragon loves Penguin by Debi Gliori

Bloomsbury, 2013. ISBN 9781408839492.
(Age: 0-5) Highly recommended. Picture book. Family. Offspring. Parenting. What a delightful story. I was almost in tears when the end came, bringing the whole tale to a completion rather like a circle, the bold crayon illustrations sweeping me along with the text. Like the glorious, Again!, the baby penguin is exhorting his mother at the beginning of this book to read him the tale in his own book, Dragon loves Penguin, his favourite story.
When the dragons arrive near the penguin colony, they all huddled around their eggs, except for one dragon who is eggless. He goes off alone and finds an abandoned egg which he raises as his own. When it hatches into a baby penguin, Dragon does everything with his chick, ignoring the derision of the other dragons about his lack of ability to fly or his lack of scales. When the nearby mountain begins to roar, shooting out lava and hot ash, the other dragons fly away leaving Little One by himself, and in the snow he finds an egg.
And so the story comes around full circle, with the one penguin, the one raised by the dragon, and the other the egg found by the penguin. It is a delight. The warmth and comfort of the penguin snuggling into its mother for a bedtime story at the start is replicated at the end when three generations are together reading their story.
Fran Knight