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Dragons Love Tacos 2, by Adam Rubin and Daniel Salmieri, for Timeslip Tuesday

Here's a fun picture book for Timeslip Tuesday (which is code for "yet another week in which Charlotte wasn't organized enough to read a longer book in a timely fashion"). I have to confess I have never read Dragons Love Tacos, by Adam Rubin, illustrated Daniel Salmieri.  I feel, however, that I grasped the point, and the sequel (Dragons Love Tacos 2) gracefully fills in what happened in the first book.

In this sequel, dragons still love tacos, but there are no more tacos to be had!  They are all gone.  The unnamed human protagonist fortunately has a time machine, and he takes a few of the dragons back to when there still were tacos, so they can bring them back and plant them and restore tacos to the grieving world.  Time-travel with taco-eating dragons is tricky; spicy tacos make Dragons flame, which is bad for the time machine, as is accidently using salsa in place of engine grease...so things get a little wonky, and the pure time travel of the first few hops in the machine, looking for a time before the dragons ate the spicy tacos, gives way to surreal alternate universe travel (dragons love diapers!  tacos love dragons!).

As a time-travel purist, I can't quite approve--there's a lack of clarity to the time travel even before it gets weird.  Why did the protagonist think they'd travelled too far back in time on the second hop?  Yes, it's prehistoric (mixing "cave man" and triceratops, sigh), but the tacos look fine... I don't understand why the protagonist kid thought there was a problem.  (If anyone can answer this for me, please do!).

So don't read it for the time travel, but take it for what it is--a silly (in the positive sense of the word) story with illustrations that are pleasantly relaxed and whimsical.

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