I picked up Trudy Krisher’s 2018 picture book Bark Park! because I enjoyed the books that Brooke Boynton-Hughes had written and illustrated, and I was curious what her work illustrating others’ works was like.
The answer is, the images here are a delicate, well-designed pleasure. The color palette is gentle, and the images themselves blend creativity (the dogs chewing a triceratops skeleton, for example) with clean lines and skilled positioning on the page.
As for the book’s content, it too is a gentle pleasure. There’s no story, at least not in the sense of a character trying to reach some objective. Instead, it is an episodic series of related anecdotes. Basically, this followed beloved dogs through a very happy day that includes a trip to the dog park, detours to enjoy mud and ice cream, and a return home to a bath and bed.
All of this love letter to dogs is told in simple rhyming couplets, with just a few words per page (two lines on the most “wordy” page, for example).
If you and your kids love dogs, you’ll enjoy this.
