Monday, June 27, 2016

Book Review: A Perfect Day for Digging (dog, garden, digging, girl, boy)

A Perfect Day for Digging, by Cari Best with illustrations by Christine Davenier (Two Lions, 2014, 39 pages, $17.99, ages Preschool – Grade 1)


Another Golden Retriever?

Perhaps. If you squint. But if you are not a golden retriever person, this dog could be Anydog, even yours. That’s the beauty of Christine Davenier’s illustrations.

Hooray for Dirty Digging!

Nell, dressed in red overalls with fun garden rainboots, and Rusty, her trusty sidekick of a dog, are outside making a garden on probably the first day of spring, when “the trees unfreeze,” but they also find long-lost treasures you remember from your childhood: a marble, a wiggly worm, . . . .

“Dirt is for Digging, Rusty, Not Eating.”

Nell digs like a chipmunk and digs like a badger and digs like a mole and digs like a steam shovel while Rusty digs like a dog (usually)(because he is one).

Golden Dirt Angels, chocolate paws, and a story full of fun words that sound alike and go together in unique ways: clumpy, lumpy dirt is dirt we can all see in our mind’s eye.

Norman from next door, on the other hand, hates getting dirty. Can Nell convince Norman to dig in the dirt? Can Rusty convince Norman to dig in the dirt? Read A Perfect Day for Digging and find out!

Fun Words and An Illustration to Gnaw On

I love the new word combinations that are so vibrantly visual like ‘crunch’ and ‘crumble’ the still somewhat frozen spring earth. Love the action-packed watercolors of a dog in motion, however, the outdoor doghouse depicted is good only for a discussion that dogs nowadays are part of the family and should live primarily indoors like us. 

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