This Is A Dog by Ross Collins

This Is a Dog by Ross Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a lot to love about this vivid, bold and deeply emphatic takeover of a picture book by a dog. It is nominally ‘My First Animal Book’; a Ladybird-esque introduction to a series of animals, but that’s not good enough for the dog who makes it all about himself. This, as you may imagine, does not go down terribly well with the other animals…

Collins is a distinctive presence in the world of picture books, and this is ferociously joyful. The dog himself is one of those scrabbly everything breeds and almost bursts out of the page. He’s beautifully rendered presence, chaotic and unpredictable, and some of the spreads where he winds up the other animals are delightful.

What’s interesting about this book is that Collins plays a lot with subtext. The book begins with a fairly standard and familiar device of “This is a [insert animal name here]”, before the dog scrawls over the text – rewords it – steals it. It’s lovely, sophisticated stuff that plays nicely to the growing confidence of a child reader. It would also reward somebody able to confidently read the book ‘as it should be read’, so to speak, whilst ignoring this subtext and letting the kid figure things out for themselves. I like books that do this sort of thing – that believe in their readers – and so This Is A Dog scores highly here.

I felt, however, there were some points where it stuck the landing. I am always disappointed when a picture book does not fully embrace the transformative powers of the endpaper (particularly in a book like this which is so concerned with questioning, testing and playing with the idea of a book itself), and there were two spreads that felt a little filler. The conceit here is so good and I think it’s almost there in realising it, and in a book as good as this – as close to brilliance as it could be, these things stand out. However, I am no tiny child and I am not its intended audience. I would happily give this to a thousand readers straight away and would be intensely happy in doing so. It’s fun, bold and lovely storytelling that does something kind of wonderful. I pick up on these points that bothered me and I mention them for one reason: I can feel how close this book is to being something remarkable.

My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.

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