How to Ride a Dragonfly

Toddler-PreS–Lush, whimsical watercolor and ink illustrations beckon “you,” the main character, to shrink yourself down to thimble-size and direct you to lasso a dragonfly. Now that you’re in control of the wild insect, you can ride into a fairy world for jousting competitions with a bee and tea with fairies. By turns commanding, playful, complimentary, and scolding, the second-person narration will remind adult readers of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and their spinoffs without the element of choice. Younger readers may delight in Wilsdorf’s vivid colors and lovely textures portraying a summer day in a garden, along with the fanciful and temporary change in perspective necessitated by the kind of shrinking common to Alice in Wonderland and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Unfortunately, the choice of the universal “you” as a peach-skinned, dress-wearing blonde is likely to limit the appeal of the magical world depicted in this offering. There is slightly broader racial awareness and gender expansiveness in that one of the two fairies has brown skin and the pants-wearing dragonfly is named Priscilla.