by 
Dallas Clayton launched his writing/illustrating career with An Awesome Book! Now he is back with a bigger and more awesome book: Make Magic! Do Good! His new book is a collection of poems and illustrations.
An Awesome Book was a single poem joyfully illustrated by Clayton. Make Magic! Do Good! is full of dozens of his children’s poems with a single illustration. This turns out to be a great way for my kids to pick which poems they want to hear. As a I flip through the book they get drawn to the illustrations that most captures their mood.
My kids favorites: “Real Live Dragon”, “Robots”, and “The Unicorn Glade.” My favorite was “Xavier Xing Xu.” [He] was terribly blue/ that the number of/ x-fronted words was so few.
As with his previous series of Awesome books, each of these poems overflow with joy and optimism. They bring a smile to my face. The book is best summed up by the book jacket summary:
I wrote this book to remind you that
you’re magic.
You’re reading this.
You right now.
You here and you there.
You’re something special,
and I hope that someday
you get a chance
to make your own book
or paint your own picture
or build your own rocket ship
or find your own kind of happiness
and that you get a chance
to share it with the rest of us
just like I got a chance
to share my happiness
with you.
I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of the book from the publisher.
This first appeared in Wired.com’s GeekDad
