Book Review: Dragon Cowboy by Michael Dahl **UPDATE**

Book:  Dragon Cowboy
Author: Michhael Dahl
Pages: 40
Cybil Book #16

Dragon Cowboy' Description from this site
An Age of Dragons is about to begin. The powerful creatures will return to rule the world once more, but this time will be different. This time they will have allies. Around the world, some young humans are making a strange discovery. They are learning that they were born with dragon blood - blood that gives them amazing powers.

My Thoughts

I received two books in the mail today. I love getting mail. So excited for mail, especially when there are books involved. The one package was slim and when I opened it I really thought it might be a joke. This book is very short with only a few sentences per page and several pages are just a picture.

What I cannot figure out is why this book was in my category to judge. How is this book geared for middle grade? This is a book that I would read to my 5 year old son at night. It literally took me five minutes to read.

I cannot really gauge the quality of the book because it is not even close in comparison to the other novels. I don't know how I can compare 20+ sentences in a five minute read to a book of 200-400 pages. I am not saying this book is bad because that would not be fair. What I am saying is that this book does not belong in a category for middle grade readers. Maybe I am missing something here and I don't mean any of this in a bad way, but I still feel like someone is playing a joke on me by having me read this.

P.S. I just wrote more words in this review than are in this book.

UPDATE
I wanted to be sure that everyone who originally read this review has a chance to see the update. After discovering a litte bit more about this book, I wanted to clarify and expand on my thoughts. One of the great panelists of the Cybils that I am working with provided me with the following information about the book:

The Dragonblood series is designed as a Hi-Lo series for kids who read below grade level.



Reading Level: 1-3


Interest Level: 3-8

http://www.capstonepub.com/product/9781434221117


Now that I am aware of the intended audience, I want to strikeout the comments of this book being a joke. I still want to say that this was not intended to be a mean comment. I would like to add that for the targeted reading level this is a great read. The visuals really suck the reader in and the vocabulary words are highlighted and stand out from the rest to help with descriptive writing. Please take note of the update and I am glad that I found out more(thanks Sheila) because for the goal of the book it does a great job.