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Cheng, Christopher

Powerful like a Dragon

40 pp. | Roaring Brook | April, 2025 | Trade ISBN 9781250829399 $18.99 | Ebook ISBN 9781250425133 $11.99
(2) K-3 Illustrated by Jacqueline Tam. Too young to understand the reason for the war but nevertheless affected by it, Shu Lok sets out with his family, minus his parents, into China in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941. Along the way, he experiences many hardships but finds the strength to endure from his baba’s parting words: “Be powerful like a dragon.” He adopts the dragons’ noble spirit and tends to his travel companions, easing their mental and physical loads throughout the trek until the group finds refuge. Cheng’s narration alternates between describing the sensory and emotional details of Shu Lok’s day-to-day experiences and painting broader strokes that convey the vast geographic distance and extended timeline of the arduous journey. Tam’s digital illustrations complement the text well, expanding and contracting in scope between close-ups of Shu Lok and his fellow travelers and landscapes that take up a full spread with the humans as tiny figures dwarfed by the terrain. The strategic use of lines for coloring and shading adds texture, depth, and movement to the illustrations. Sinuous shapes and suggestive shadows hiding in plain sight keep the dragon motif alive on pages where the creatures are not explicitly depicted. An author’s note filling in the family history (Shu Lok is Cheng’s uncle) and the historical context for the narrative is appended.
Reviewer: | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2025

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