Feeling Hopeful

Hope the dragon can’t stand to see so much Fear everywhere all over the world. The Fear looks different to everyone, and it affects no two people in quite the same way. Hope does what he can, chasing down Fear and eating it up when he can, but the job is too great for one dragon by himself.

Hope seeks out the mysterious Reader, who helps him to realise that he needs help and, together, they turn all the Fear that Hope consumed into beautiful books, bundles of paper magic. Hope delivers the books to the children whose Fear he consumed, now understanding that he, with the help of the Reader’s books and wisdom, can help allay and remove the Fear of the world’s children.

A very poignant story about the importance of hope in battling fear, Hope the dragon’s journey to understand that while he is key in stopping Fear, he cannot do it alone holds a powerful message. The importance and simple magic of books and reading is very strongly portrayed, and young readers will do well to learn that hope can be just the thing when you are afraid.

1. The main character, Hope, is a dragon that eats Fear, which is represented as a purple. No violence or gore is shown on-page, Hope is just said to be eating Fear several times, described as chomping, crunching, munching, etc. 2. The Reader, a racoon, is said to have ‘bundled paper magic’, which is shown to be books. He brews a potion using Hope’s tears of Fear, but no explicit reference to magic is made.