Wolves<\/em>. <\/p>\nI think mostly the issue is just one of intended audience: Wolves<\/em> was aimed at grades 1-3, so it’s got some good verbal and visual play happening, while Dogs<\/em> is aimed at younger kids, preschool to grade 1, so it’s more basic, with simple and straightforward text. Each pair of facing pages includes a pair of dogs—or sometimes more—and follows the pattern you can see in the above “I love tough dogs\/and soft dogs” spread. Page A is “I love dogs that [do\/are thing x]” and page B is “and dogs that [do\/are the opposite of thing x].” I can see how this is good for little kids: there’s lots of space on the page, the sentences are easy to follow and teach about opposites, and the dogs are undeniably endearing.<\/p>\nFor a grown-up reader who isn’t reading to a kid, the art isn’t quite enough to carry the book, but it’s still pretty great. The endpapers feature black and white drawings of different dogs, labeled by breed: a happy-looking Saluki, a solid little Bull Terrier, a wary-looking [English] Bulldog, a cuddly-looking Shar-Pei. The color illustrations in the main part of the book are fleshed-out and sweet and often funny: the title page features a worried-looking St. Bernard holding a ragged toy bunny in its mouth; another spread includes a concerned-looking Westie watching a German Shepherd and another big dog tear the stuffing out of another toy; another spread includes two bigger dogs looking dismayed at a tiny Chihuahua’s loud barking. Gravett captures the dogs really well in various poses—at rest or running or playing—and the different personalities of different dogs\/breeds come across. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Several years ago, Megan and I read a picture book called Wolves by Emily Gravett, and were struck by how funny and clever and all-around excellent it was. So when I saw Dogs while wandering through Barnes & Noble in search of a page-a-day calendar, I was really excited: Emily Gravett, yay! And I love […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-picture-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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