Melissa, the main character in Sundog Rescue, is one of those young children whose fears are triggered by an overactive imagination. In her fantasies, which are always related to nature, she sees sharks in a puddle, big-eared mice in a hedge, and wriggling spiderlegs in a cracked windshield. Fortunately, her grandmother understands Melissa and helps her deal with her fears by relating her own childhood experiences. However, Melissa’s imaginings are presented one after another without the use of transitional sentences or phrases, which makes the first half of the book very disjointed.

The latter half of the book, in which Melissa and her grandmother cope with a crisis, hangs together better. When Melissa’s grandmother hurts her foot during a winter walk, Melissa has to conquer her fear of shadow wolves while she runs for help. Here, Lohans makes effective use of onomatopoeia to heighten suspense (“kthwook-kthwokk, kthwook-kthwokk” describes their footsteps in deep snow).

While Lohans’s writing appeals to our sense of sound, Vladyana Langer Krykorka’s vibrant and detailed illustrations visually involve us in worlds past and present. Krykorka depicts the varying moods of the book by using a predominance of yellows when the text refers to the warmth and comfort of the grandmother’s childhood, and a combination of blues and whites to portray fear. Her unique use of watercolours and pencil crayons gives the illustrations an attractively haunting luminescence.