This collection of short fairy tales was first published in 1899. E Nesbit came to writing children’s books later in her career, but she excelled at it. Many of her books are still in print today, more than a century after they were first published.

The first story is The Book of Beasts, about a young boy who finds a book and learns that when he opens the page, he releases the depicted being into the real world. Of course, the first one he releases is the dragon and that is NOT good. He has to open several other pages before he arrives at a solution.

Nesbit populates her stories with all manner of dragons … big, small, hungry, kind, fierce, curious, sleeping. One involves an ice dragon and two intrepid children who seek to find the source of the Aurora Borealis. Another involves a princess trapped on an enchanted island guarded by nine whirlpools and a fierce dragon, whose spell can only be broken by an extremely clever and worthy man. All of them are delightful and all feature marvelous illustrations by H. R. Millar. (5-stars for the illustrations.) ( )

I thought the book would have been better but it seemed boring, to me. The fist story was okay but it seemed to have too many "naughty" children as the central characters. I also had a hard time understanding some of the British concepts and wished the edition I read would explain them better for Americans. ( )

Cute collection of fairy stories with dragons in them. Some were quite good; some had major logic fails, which bothers me even in fairy stories (if spinning round the right way changed the animals' sizes, did it also remove the bun trees? And what about everyone being good? The story said those were all related...). I'd have liked to read the ninth story that MelHay reviews, but it doesn't appear here - maybe an audiobook bonus? Mildly pleasant, and possibly worth rereading after a while. Hah, found "The Last of the Dragons" available free online. Yes, that's a nice story - and with somewhat older protagonists (many of the stories in The Book of Dragons have children under 10 as protagonists - and there's only so much sibling squabbling I can take). ( )

All the stories are enjoyable and they generally contain off-kilter and somewhat sardonic morals. ( )

As you might expect from the title, this is a collection of stories about dragons of all shapes and sizes, living in a variety of habitats and encountering a variety of humans. I liked some stories more than others; the ones I didn’t like as much contained boys proclaiming their girl companions “smart, for girls”, and the fourth-wall-breaking narration was hit-or-miss for me. Perhaps something I would have liked more as a kid. ( )