Curtis Manley’s 2025 picture book Grace Builds an <Almost-Perfect> Dog surprised me.
Even though Tracy Subisak’s cover image clearly shows a girl hugging a dog, with an array of tools sitting on the floor in front of them, I really didn’t think the book would be about building a dog. But it is.
The premise is that Grace has been asking for a dog for “3,124 days” and her parents had been saying no for just as long…until Grace learns about a robot dog that seemed like a solution to their problem. They agree, she orders the dog, and, once the kit arrives, she puts it together (with great effort). She turns it on, it malfunctions, and she fixes it, all the while consulting the hundreds of steps and tips in the manual, and dealing with snarky comments from Danny next door.
Eventually, the dog works perfectly…and that’s boring to the point where Grace turns it off. When she goes to the dog park alone, she sees a host of dogs acting up. She learns from her observations, and reprograms the dog for mischief.
This works, but gets him into trouble, until Grace learns from her fix and programs in absolute obedience to certain commands, making him, in the end, the “Best dog in the known universe.”
This book does several things at once. It shows a character with both initiative and perseverance. It shows the innovation process, even including two pages at the end explaining product development and coding. It shows understanding of some of what people like about dogs. And it includes several pages of code/Grace coding. That last is the least successful part of the book, as it seems unlikely a commercially available robot dog kit would require (or even allow) coding–and the book starts with Grace’s desire for a dog, not any background on tech/coding. This seems to leap over some key details. As a dog lover, I also wondered if she’d find a robot (and non-AI) dog as emotionally satisfying as she seems to.
But it was interesting and entertaining.
