Dog Blue

Sometimes ‘less is more’, as this elegant, charming little book demonstrates. Bertie wants a blue dog. He wants a blue dog more than anything in the world. He pats his pretend blue dog. He takes his pretend blue dog for walks and he throws sticks for his pretend blue dog. Suddenly, a real dog comes along looking for an owner. The only problem, of course, is that he isn’t blue. He’s spotty. So spotty dog is given the name Blue and the two friends are soon immersed in the all the games that Bertie had dreamed of, and others besides. The author cleverly combines word and image, using only vignettes of the characters and no backgrounds, showing how much pace and movement can be generated through good design with careful attention to scale, picture space and background colour. A nicely understated theme gently emerges, reminding us that good things don’t always come in the form that we expect them.