Here is a thing I have come to accept about parenting in the 2020s: there is a small handful of picture books that have achieved the cultural saturation that Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon had when I was a kid. Books that show up at every birthday party, every classroom, every pediatrician's office, every "first books for baby" gift bundle. Dragons Love Tacos is one of them. It's on the shelf in every house I walk into. My son got two copies at his fourth birthday. I'm not entirely sure what it says about the current generation of children's literature that a book whose central conceit is "dragons enjoy a specific Mexican food item" has become canon. I'm also not sure I care, because the book is genuinely, legitimately, no-asterisks great.
Let me get the weird part out of the way first. The premise has no logic. Why do dragons love tacos? The book itself shrugs at you. Maybe it's the smell. Maybe it's the crunch. Maybe it's a secret. That's the actual text. The narrator, who is talking directly to the kid reading, repeatedly admits he doesn't know why dragons feel the way they do about anything. They love tacos. They love parties. They hate spicy salsa. Don't ask. Just go with it.
And here is what I have come to believe after roughly four hundred readings: refusing to explain the premise is the entire point. This book is not teaching a lesson. It is not building toward a moral. It's a deadpan comedian doing a tight eight-minute set about an absurd hypothetical, and it commits so completely to the bit that you stop questioning it around page three. The narrator speaks to the kid, then speaks to the dragons, then speaks to the kid again, like it's a podcast hosted by a guy who has fully accepted that his audience is split between two species. The prose has rhythm. It has restraint. Adam Rubin knows exactly when to be specific (chicken tacos, beef tacos, baby tacos) and exactly when to be vague (maybe it's a secret). That tension is where the comedy lives.
The read-aloud is the whole game
About one Moth wide, perfectly sized for a four-year-old's lap during the inevitable taco chaos. Moth looks appropriately concerned about the mess.
Some picture books are written. Dragons Love Tacos is performed. Every sentence has a rest in it. There are pauses built into the text the way pauses are built into a stand-up routine. The bit where the narrator describes what to put in a dragon's taco, listing toppings one by one, is structured for read-aloud delivery. I do a slightly weary, slightly conspiratorial voice for the narrator, like a guy who has been burned by dragons before and is just trying to save you the same fate. My son loses his mind every time I hit the "oh boy..." moment. I have done this voice approximately one hundred times. It still works.
Daniel Salmieri's illustrations deserve their own paragraph. The dragons are not cool. They are not sleek fantasy dragons. They look like slightly damp, slightly dopey cartoon animals who happen to breathe fire. They have eyebrows. They have weird little expressions. My daughter, who is eight and pretends to be too old for this book, will still pause on a spread and point at one specific dragon and ask why it looks like that. I don't have an answer. Nobody has an answer. The art is committed to its own weirdness in the same way the writing is committed to its own logic gap.
The re-read test, which this book passes in a way I find suspicious
Here is the part where I'm supposed to tell you about the book that wears out by read three. This is not that book. I have read Dragons Love Tacos roughly the same number of times as I've read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and my wife will confirm I have read the caterpillar approximately a billion times, but the difference is I don't dread Dragons. I actually catch myself enjoying it on the thirtieth read. The jokes have a slow burn. The pacing absorbs repetition. There's a beat near the end about the dragons being good Samaritans, or feeling bad, or maybe just being in it for the taco breaks, and that last option still gets a small laugh out of me. That is a hard thing for a picture book to pull off.
The kid engagement is bulletproof. My son, who is four and physical about everything, does the chomping motion when the dragons eat the tacos. My daughter, who has aged into being too sophisticated for picture books and now reads chapter books in her bedroom before sunrise, will still wander out and sit on the edge of the bed when she hears me reading this one to her brother. She doesn't admit she's listening. She is one hundred percent listening.
I've read this book so many times that I now use "crunch, crunch, crunch..." in real life whenever I want my kids to stop doing something but they keep going anyway. Which is multiple times a day, obviously.
Message, values, the thing I'm supposed to talk about
There isn't one. There really isn't. You could squint and say it's about reading the fine print, or about friends helping friends fix what they broke, or about the dangers of jalapeño peppers in foods marked mild. None of those are the point. The point is "dragons love tacos." That's it. That's the whole thesis. And I have come to believe that books like this, books that cheerfully refuse to teach anything, are actually doing important work. Not every story needs to be a lesson. Sometimes a kid just needs to laugh at the same joke four nights in a row and learn that books can be that, too.
Dad survival rate is exceptional. I rank this in the top tier of read-aloud books I've encountered in the seven years I've been doing this, alongside the Mo Willems pigeon books and anything by Jon Klassen. It does not make me want to narrate in the voice of a dying Victorian clergyman to entertain myself. It entertains me on its own. That is the highest compliment I give a picture book.
So yeah. Five stars. Buy it for every kid in your life. Accept that you will read it more times than you can count. Accept that you will not know why dragons love tacos. None of us know. That's the deal.
