Love is My Favourite Thing

The author’s own dog, Plum, is given the role of narrator in this, her own picture book that grew out of the Plumdog blog. Essentially, the book is all about love – Plum’s absolute favourite thing. It’s pretty much an all embracing thing, this love of Plum’s: she loves weather in many forms (apart from rain), her bear and her bed, sticks, treats, the next door children (who come through the hedge to play) and in particular, Emma and Rupert her ‘mummy and daddy’ and all the things they do together, things through which they show their love of Plummie, as she likes to be called.

There are times though when Plum’s joie de vivre lands her trouble and then one thing leads to another and a little trouble quickly becomes a disaster, or rather, a series of disasters resulting in banishment to bed in a dark room. Seemingly that’s the end of things where Plum and love are concerned. Fortunately for her though, that’s not quite the case; seemingly this family’s love for that crazy canine creature is unconditional.

The variety of spreads ranges from vignette through to double-page spread with a scattering of comic strip pages. These are effective in orchestrating the pace of the story and directing the reader’s focus to the humour of the whole good/bad behaviour dilemma Plum dog repeatedly finds herself faced with. Dog owners in particular will lap this one up.