Green Dragon Book

Two boys, probably in the 5th or 6th grade, came up to me the other day. One of the boys was trying to tell his friend about a book he had read, but he couldn't remember the title or the author. All he could remember was that there was a dragon on the cover, and that it wasn't the Eragon series by Christopher Paolini.

 I asked the boy if he could tell me what the book was about. His response: "Well, the book was green..."

Hmm, not very helpful. But when he said there was a dragon on the cover my mind immediately went to another popular series of dragon books: The Last Dragon Chronicles, written by Chris D'Lacey. Each book in the series shows a close-up picture of a dragon's eye on the cover, and each book also features a different color. I was pretty sure that one of the books in that series was green. So I took a shot in the dark and walked the boys over to the shelf where this series is kept and, sure enough, the first book in the series (The Fire Within) was the book he had been thinking of.

Thank goodness.  If this hadn't been the right book, I might have had to resort to showing the boys every single book that we have that features dragons.  That's a lot of books!

Often it's really hard to figure out these mystery books when all we have to go on is the color of the book.  Clues like the plot of the book, the setting, or even the main character's name are usually much better clues because they better narrow down our options.  These clues are even searchable in reader's advisory databases like Novelist or even on Google, where book color really isn't.  Color also becomes tricky when a book has been reprinted with a different cover because the book on the library shelf might not match the image that the patron is familiar with.  Most book covers also feature multiple colors, and it's amazing how different colors in an image stand out to different people - a book cover that I might describe as yellow, for example, might appear blue to someone else.