This... is a weird book. If you've read it, I would love to hear your opinions.
The story: a group of rude, dirty dogs moves into the house next door to the book's main character, a little girl. She tries to be neighborly and befriend them, but the dogs reject her overtures (after eating all the bacon). Eventually they become friends, though:
After my homework was done, we had time to play.
Some days we'd go down to the river just to sniff around.
It was pretty there, and the dogs enjoyed the mud.
The text is lyrical and maybe beautiful, without the sort of overt cat/sat/mat rhymes found in so many kids' books. There's an almost dreamy nostalgia for the narrator's childhood days with the dogs--a nostalgia that will likely go right over the target market's heads.
These are anthropomorphic dogs, btw, who drive cars and work the night shift at the junk yard, and this is what makes the book weird: clearly these dogs the little girl is hanging out with are adults, though what that means for anthropomorphic dogs isn't clear.
The tension in the book is driven by the girl's discovery that the dogs are criminals, on the lam from the law for stealing a banjo. She breaks into their house to look for evidence of their crime and confronts the dogs when they come home.
Let's go for a drive, they propose, and this girl goes off to the river with the dogs she knows are criminals. And then they murder her and dump her body No, that doesn't happen. They have a nice evening together and everything is fine. But in the morning the dogs are gone. They've taken off for Alaska (and stolen the girl's lawn flamingoes).
If this were a middle grade or YA novel, I would rate it "inappropriate for children" due to the main character doing something idiotically dangerous. But this is a picture book, so I'm not really worried about my 3 yr old going for a ride with an a criminal canine.
My 3 yr old enjoyed the book. It had dogs and cars, after all.
And in the end, says the narrator, they weren't really bad dogs.
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