Ferocio is a very sweet Dragon, who lives alone in the bottom of Lake Titicaca. He does not know that roaring and throwing fire through his mouth scares people who approach him. One day, he meets two children who are lost and as a result of this encounter his life changes forever.
Genre: Children / Picture Books
Age appropriate: 4-8 years’ old
Number of Pages: 32 pages
Date of Publication: 23 April 2020
Ferocio was written and illustrated by Martha McCollam who has always believed that children live stories as part of their reality.
This is a story that is aimed at smaller children and that includes important topics like acceptance and friendship.
The simple silly narrative of the story will keep children entertained and also includes questions asked by the dragon which can allows parent to begin a conversation with children about what is happening in the book.
Acceptance is such an important topic for children to understand and this book focuses on it. Ferocio is not a normal dragon with his elephant ears and toad mouth and also as he is the last one on earth people are scared of him, but what they don’t know is that he is a friendly dragon who wishes to have friends and who spends most of the time being sad and crying. When Ferocio meets two boys and they start teaching him how to smile we are able to see a great connection form between the characters where they accept and start learning from each other and this is how their new friendship starts.
A very cool fact is that Ferocio lives at the bottom of Lake Titicaca (between Peru and Bolivia) so children are able to learn about where it is and get curious about other facts about the world.
The writing is simple which allows children to fully understand what is happening. The illustrations are a bit different which makes this book special as they are in a primitivist style to create the impression of the children having illustrated their experience and they are very colourful.
My youngest enjoyed this book and he definitely found the story really good and was very engaged as he didn’t want the dragon to be sad.
The book has been translated from Spanish.
Availability: The book is available on Amazon as a paperback or as a kindle edition.