Annal:1997 Golden Kite Picture Book Illustration Award

The Paper Dragon

Marguerite W. Davol, Robert Sabuda

• 1997 Golden Kite-picturebook text winner
• 1997 Golden Kite-picturebook illustration winner*
• Score: 10.47

Mi Fei is a humble painter of scrolls. Between each day’s sunrise and sunset, he paints scenes of the gods and their festivals’ portraits of heroes and their deeds. Although the scrolls bring him fame, Mi Fei is content to live in his village, surrounded by people he loves.

But one day a messenger enters the village with terrible news: the dragon Sui Jen has awakened from its hundred years’ sleep and is destroying everything in its path. Someone must find a way to return Sui Jen to its slumber. To the villagers, only one among them is wise enough to confront the scaly beast—Mi Fei.

The power of the artist’s vision and the ever-sustaining nature of love are brought together in Marguerite W. Davol’s beautiful story, strikingly interpreted by Robert Sabuda in a series of gatefold illustrations that convey the storytelling majesty of the Chinese narrative scrollmaker’s art.

To Market, To Market

Anne Miranda, Janet Stevens

• 1997 Golden Kite-picturebook illustration honor
• Score: 6.47

Anne Miranda’s inventive twist on a classic rhyme tells what happens after a shopper goes “to market, to market, to buy a fat pig.” Back home the pig promptly escapes, and soon the pig’s in the kitchen, the lamb’s on the bed, the cow’s on the couch — and the rest of the animals are wreaking havoc throughout the house.