All three beloved Johnny Lion books are back! Whether he is reveling in the adventures of his first book, finding a cure for the rainy-day blues, or experiencing all the misery—and coziness—of a bad, bad cold, Johnny Lion is a delight. Edith Thacher Hurd's lively text is perfectly captured in the tender illustrations by her husband, Clement Hurd, the illustrator of Goodnight Moon .About the The legendary team of Edith Thacher Hurd and Clement Hurd created nearly fifty books for children. Clement Hurd is also the illustrator of the cherished classics Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny , both by Margaret Wise Brown.
Johnny Lion has a cold and has to stay in bed all day. He occasionally drowses and has some bad dreams, but it's unclear if he is having fever dreams or if they are induced by the medicine his parents keep pouring down his throat -- cough syrup in the 1960s when this book was written could contain a large percentage of alcohol and/or other substances now strictly controlled.
My daughter insisted on a ritual of me reading her books about colds, illness, and check-ups whenever she got sick, and this was one of the regulars, along with some Pooh and Berenstain books. She liked this one, but no matter how many times I read it, I never grew fond of it. Too many dream sequences for my taste.
Should be called Johnny Lion's Fever Dreams or Johnny Lion's LSD Trip. Wow! One might conclude that medicine is bad because it gives you bad dreams. A book about being sick is good. A book about being comforted after bad dreams is good. But both together make it problematic.
It's especially fun because it's done by the same illustrator as Good Night Moon and Runaway Bunny. Be sure to read these together, so your child will have nightmares of those rabbits coming after them, just like Johnny Lion! AAAAHHHH!!
Little Johnny Lion had a bad cold and had to stay in bed all day. It seemed that every time he was given medicine he had a strange dream. Cute imaginative story. 64 pages.
Long and in that category of levelled readers that aren't really that interesting, no offense, so the best you can say about them is they help kids practice reading.
This book was terrble! It was very outdated and the pictures were just bad. I don't see myself using this book anytime in my own classroom because it is dull and boring!