The twelve dogs of Christmas

Elizabeth’s Studio by Kevin Whitlark
Published by Milltown

Age group:

babies and toddlers

Format:

10 cloth pages*

This book, the twelve dogs of Christmas, was given to a young friend of ours and shown to me as something a bit, well strange!

The story

An animal lover’s version of the 12 days of Christmas, where we count dogs instead of days.

My review

So the text is no real surprise in that it follows the pattern of ‘on the first day my true dog sent me one…, on the second day he sent me two…’ and each day has the appropriate number of dogs given.

This is a cloth book so suitable for babies and toddlers to manipulate and chew on! It has larger pages than most cloth books, I think, but is quite thin (ie there is no real padding between the pages as some cloth books have).

At the same time, the content is a bit long for a baby or toddler so may suit older children or even adult dog lovers wanting something a little different. Of course, the pictures and the key text for each page would be enough for a toddler to follow.

The illustrations match the words, so there are six dogs playing and so forth. The dogs are cartoon drawings in full colour and quite cute.

However, some of the dogs’ actions were unexpected to say the least. For example, a ‘fat cat in a fur tree’ and ‘ten labs a’ licking’ are a little strange and ‘11 puppies pooping’ was a bit tasteless and unnecessary to my mind.

So do I recommend the Twelve Dogs of Christmas? Not really! It’s not awful or worth avoiding but I just can’t see enough value in taking the time to find it, make it or read it, frankly.

* Or can be used as 10 panels to hang on a wall or create a quilt from, apparently.