Saint George and the Dragon

Margaret Hodges retells a single episode from Edmund Spenser's sixteenth century epic The Faerie Queene: the Redcrosse Knight, guided by a princess named Una, arrives in her kingdom to find it terrorized by a dragon that has held the land captive for years, its fields scorched and its people in hiding. The knight fights the dragon across three separate days of battle, wounded badly enough each time that he must recover beside a healing well and, later, beneath a tree whose sap restores him, before finally driving his lance through the dragon's mouth and killing it. The kingdom celebrates its freedom, the knight and Una are betrothed, and the story closes with the land restored to the ordinary, unthreatened life the dragon had taken from it.

Trina Schart Hyman paints in lush, richly detailed scenes of medieval armor, wildflowers, and the dragon itself, framing many pages with decorative borders that recall illuminated manuscripts; in one especially striking spread the dragon's tail physically extends past the edge of its own page into the border decoration of the page that follows, tying the two together across the gutter.

Read aloud, the formal, slightly archaic language Hodges carried over from Spenser and the real menace of the three day battle suit an audience a bit older than the youngest picture book readers, roughly six through ten, and the book's romantic, storybook grandeur rewards a slow, dramatic reading voice rather than a brisk one. Hodges keeps enough of Spenser's original stakes, real fear, real wounds, a genuine risk across three separate rounds of combat that the knight might actually lose, that the eventual victory feels earned rather than assumed from the very first page, which is part of why the book plays better read slowly than rushed toward its ending.