Good Dog
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In this heart-stealing picture book, fine artist Robert Rahway Zakanitch gives us 16 masterful, soulful, impossibly expressive portraits of dogs, and Maya Gottfried wonderfully captures their voices and inner personalities in 16 enchanting poems. It’s a doggie delight!
These dogs beg to be patted, tickled, scratched, and ruffled. Which one will be your best friend?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Every dog has his day and his own spread in this spunky collection of poems from a dog's eye view, created by the team behind Last Night I Dreamed a Circus. These pooches have personality plus, from the chow who's eager to get outdoors ("Listen Up! It's time to go./ Get the leash. Let's hit the road") to a recently groomed Pomeranian upset about his appearance ("Look at me!/ Hair! Hair! Hair! I can barely see!/ Now I'm as round as a powder puff./ This is just embarrassing"). Alongside their individual poems, each of the 15 purebreds featured here (plus a mutt) appears in a full-color, full-page portrait on black background, opposite several spot sketches in black and white. The design helps give readers a more rounded understanding of what the dogs are really like. Gottfried's brief verses brim with a warm humor that pet owners will readily appreciate (e.g., a maltese with flowing white fur and a flower over its brow inspires a riff on marital vows: "Do you take this dog to be your friend?/ Do you promise to... be faithful to her, and her alone?"). Young readers will also have a chuckle imagining dogs expressing various sentiments. For his inviting artwork, Zakanitch takes inspiration from his previous "Aggressive Goodness Series" of large-scale canine paintings, and Gottfried also used the artwork as her inspiration for the verse. They do these dogs proud. Ages 4-8.