Today I read Short Dog, Long Dog: A Book of Opposites by Anna Hrachovec (2025).
As the subtitle suggests, this book is intended to teach simple concepts, all built around opposition.
There are a lot of books out there teaching on this level. My local library has a standard sticker they put on the spine, a red oval reading “Concepts.”
Two things set this book apart. First, it rhymes. The rhymes are simple, but sometimes surprising (“tiny” gets rhymed with “hiney,” for example. Second, and much more striking, all the figures in the book (the short dog and the long dog, for example, are all made out of yarn. Some, like the yellow dog (the “long dog”), look fairly simple. Others, like animal playing electric guitar, are decidedly more complicated.
Expect a lot of questions along the lines of “How did she make that?” when you read this.
Good stuff. I’ll be looking for more Hrachovec books, to see what she does with her yarn creatures.
