I Want a Dog: ALA Notable Book, Reading Rainbow Review Book

The creator of Tales of a Gambling Grandma presents the age-old argument between kids and their parents: May wants a dog, and the more her parents deny her one, the more obsessed she becomes. They tell her to wait until she's older, but she can't. In school, she sees dogs' heads on the shoulders of her classmates. She adopts a roller skate on a leash as a training model and ultimately proves herself responsible. The story may be familiar and simple in its telling, but the illustrations give it a comic sort of elegance. The book's cover is a takeoff on Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, where many breeds of dog, flattened like cut-out swatches of color, mingle with a few owners. Inside, the artist's style makes May's suburban community look perhaps too neat, too safe, like the world of her parents who take reason to excess. In May's world, only kids and dogs count. All ages. (October)