Title John Ronald's Dragons Series --- Author Caroline McAlister Illustrated By Eliza Wheeler Publisher Roaring Brook Press - 2017 First Printing Roaring Brook Press - 2017 Category Children Warnings None Main Characters John R.R. Tolkien Main Elements Dragons

A captivating picture book biography of a boy who imagined a world full of dragons and grew up to be beloved author J. R. R. Tolkien.

John Ronald loved dragons. He liked to imagine dragons when he was alone, and with his friends, and especially when life got hard or sad. After his mother died and he had to live with a cold-hearted aunt, he looked for dragons. He searched for them at his boarding school. And when he fought in a Great War, he felt as if terrible, destructive dragons were everywhere. But he never actually found one, until one day, when he was a grown man but still very much a boy at heart, when he decided to create one of his own. John Ronald's Dragons, a picture book biography by Caroline McAlister and illustrated by Eliza Wheeler, introduces the beloved creator of Middle Earth and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to a new generation of children who see magic in the world around them.

This was a lovely book. The illustrations were beautiful, the prose pleasant to read. We have a tale of a boy who was fascinated by dragons and while he admitted to not really wanting to run into one in person, he felt the world was a better place if we belived they existed somewhere distant. And when he failed to find the dragons he was looking for, he used his imagination and created one of the most famous dragons ever, the great dragon Smaug. If your children are a fan of the Hobbit, they will certainly enjoy learning more about the man who invented Hobbits and put a dragon under a Lonely Mountain.