The Dragon Prince: A Chinese Beauty & the Beast Tale by Laurence Yep
I don't remember exactly why I was looking at Laurence Yep books online. Actually I don't remember why I thought this was a novel and not a children's book either. It might have had something to do with the fact that the very first Yep book I read was "Dragonwings," a YA book.
Regardless I picked it up at the library and was actually surpised to see the thin, little, hard-bound book sitting among all my fat novels. I leafed through it slowly before just sitting down to zip through it. The thing that really caught me wasn't the writing (which was standard children's fairy tale style) but the illustrations. Each drawing was vibrantly colored with plenty of attention to detail. All of the scales on the dragon shimmer with movement. The Chinese people depicted actually look Chinese and not like racially stereotypical Asians with yellow skin and severely slanty eyes.
The writing is passable and even amusing at points. I had a brief attention quirk at the thought of the unfortunate daughters named One, Two, Three... etc. all the way up to Seven. I was also a little confused about why as an author, if you are going to have masses of daughters in a Chinese story not to have eight (which is a lucky number because in Chinese it sounds like the word "prosper"). The antagonist then (Three in this case) should have been named Four. Four in Chinese (四) sounds like a different word: death.
4 stars overall (No death pun intended!) since the illustrations are so gorgeous and the story itself so timeless.
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