Maggie and Silky and Joe - Hardcover

Kindergarten-Grade 3-The personalities of young Joe's two dogs and their relationships with the animals and humans around them are the focal point of this long picture book. When Maggie, the older dog, dies, the family buries her on a sunny hillside. Afterwards, Joe and Silky go to the swimming pool in the woods, and he cries while holding her. The story ends with the two returning home. Ehrlich tells this "boy loses dog" story with skilled restraint: Maggie's disappearance during a bad thunderstorm (she had always been frightened by them), and Joe's discovery of her body under the steps are described simply and in a straightforward manner. And Blake's paintings show the beauty of this pastoral world and sadness at the family's loss. His use of light, sense of movement, and artful composition show his talent at painting pictures that are both aesthetically pleasing and also effective at creating a mood and moving a story along. However, the ending is not totally successful; while a happy ending would have been jarring, a concluding sentence or two is needed to wrap things up a bit. And the farm life depicted here occasionally looks so pretty that the book takes on a sentimental tone. All in all, though, this is a title that anyone who has ever loved and lost an animal will appreciate.
Lauralyn Persson, Wilmette Public Library, IL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ages 4-8. From the picture-book farce Parents in the Pigpen, Pigs in the Tub (Booklist's 1993 Top of the List picture book), Ehrlich swings here to a very different farm story, a tender picture book about a family pet. Blake's realistic paintings show the wide spaces and changing light of the Vermont farm and spreading landscape. The cow dog, Maggie, has always been there for Joe ever since he was a baby. Then a stray puppy arrivesJoe names her Silkyand Maggie, Silky, and Joe are together. Maggie is afraid of thunder, and one day after a huge storm, she's nowhere to be found until Joe discovers her still body under the porch steps. Kids will feel Joe's sorrow, the physicality of his loss. A double-page-spread painting shows the family and Silky grieving in the moonlit farmyard. But in most of the pictures, the people are in the background, a small part of the open fields under the sky. It's that sense of space that helps Joe with his loss. Quietly, words and pictures show that he's comforted by his family and Silky and that all of them are part of a continuing world that includes woods and fields and the stream that travels by. Hazel Rochman