This is the illustrated edition including all the beautiful drawings by John R. Neill.John Dough is a gingerbread man who has come alive because the baker who made him poured—quite unwittingly—a great quantity of the precious Essence of Vitality into the dough from which he was formed. John escapes from several people who want to eat him, and arrives on the Isle of Phreex, where all the inhabitants are as queer as he is. His new friend and constant companion is Chick, the Cherub, a very beautiful child of indeterminate sex. (There is a contest blank bound into the book on which the reader is invited to try to solve "The Great John Dough Mystery—Is the Cherub Girl or Boy?") After a good deal of travel and many adventures, John becomes ruler of the Twin Kingdoms of Hiland and Loland, where a prophecy stated that the next king would not be "made of flesh and blood".