Okay, I misread the cover of Nelly Buchet’s 2024 picture book Dog Vs. Strawberry. I focused on the dog’s snout extending across the page toward the strawberry and thought it was either a dog v. berry fight, or a dog tries new food experience book. By that I mean, I skipped clean past the checkered flags that were meant to signal this was a book about something even sillier (in the best sense of the term): a dog vs. strawberry race!
Of course, it turns out that it’s the dog that does most of the racing–okay, just about all of it, except for a reversal near the book’s end–but that doesn’t mean that the strawberry doesn’t almost eke out a win.
As much as I enjoyed Andrea Zuill’s art for this book, I have another admission: I assumed this was a writer-illustrator, because the art and the words were integrated so smoothly. The images change scale from page to page–now focusing tightly on the berry, now pulling back to show zoomies around an entire room–but all capture the drama and energy of an indulged and obsessed pet dog. The one difference between word and image–the only place there’s distance between them–is that the images are fun in and of themselves. (You could open the book to a random page and make a kid smile.) The words need the larger story for their power.
But that’s a difference between art forms, not a criticism. This book is zany fun.
