Title Dragon Tide Series --- Author Ingrid Lee Illustrator Soizick Meister Publisher Orca Book Publishers - 2006 First Printing Orca Book Publishers - 2006 Category Children Warnings None Main Characters Main Elements Dragons

A girl and a boy watch a stranger build a dragon in the sand. The dragon must wait for the night tide to set it free. But there is danger on the beach. As the sea crawls closer, other children come. They jump and play and the dragon begins to dissolve beneath their feet. The boy and the girl must keep the dragon safe until the sea can free him.

A fantastical tale of the magic of imagination. A girl creates a dragon in the sand and tells the children that when the tide comes in the dragon will be released into the sea (though the author seems to have forgetten there are two tides a day...) The first two children are in awe of the sand creation, but the other that come later just want to destroy it, stamping it down to nothingness. Will the dragon survive the callousness of the human race to find it's freedom? It's creator doesn't seem to think so, saying it never happens, it always gets destroyed first. But the children manage to keep it mostly intact, even repair it a bit, such that when the tide does come in the dragon flies free.

I'm not a huge fan of the art style, but I did enjoy finding all the cute little things hidden in each of the picture (like a face in a wave, or a dragon-like creature in a snail shell, and for what it's worth the art style matches and beach scene quite well. On the whole I enjoyed it.