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Doggerel

by Sheila Dalton, Kim LaFave, illus.

In humorous verse, Sheila Dalton’s new book celebrates the diversity of dogs – the shaggy and the waggy, the burly and the curly, the scrawny and the yawny. Although they don’t sparkle with wit, the rhymes are inventive and varied enough to stand up to repeated readings. As the punning title itself suggests, Dalton enjoys playing with language, and shows confidence that young children will share her delight in unusual words and constructions. Most of the poem simply enumerates the amazing variety of types and qualities to be found in dogs, but it warmly concludes that the “best, most-caressed dog” is, of course, “the one that loves you.”

Kim LaFave, best known for his comical rendering of the quirky, determined farm animals and their baffled owners in Amos’s Sweater and Duck Cakes for Sale, is a natural choice to illustrate Doggerel. His double-page pictures, each illustrating a line or two of text, are full of action and fun. While the text tells of “Bernard dogs that save mountaineers,” the picture shows a group of dogs partying merrily on the mountainside with the contents of the St. Bernard’s keg, while the hapless mountaineer is left stranded upside-down in a snowbank. Other illustrations interpret the text more directly, but never with a simple literalism, so they continually engage the child reader in the task of selecting the particular dog or dog-behaviour described in the verse. As in any good picture book, text and illustrations harmonize in spirit, but the pictures here embellish the words and add their own little narrative possibilities that child and adult readers can enjoy talking about together.

 

Reviewer: Gwyneth Evans

Publisher: Doubleday

DETAILS

Price: $12.95

Page Count: 32 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-385-25533-0

Released: April

Issue Date: 1996-4

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Picture Books

Age Range: ages 4–8