Stick Dog Wants a Hot Dog by Tom Watson
| Stick Dog Wants a Hot Dog by Tom Watson | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Another Wimpy Kid-styled franchise, this time with canine heroes and a real feel of trying too hard for diminished returns. | |
| Buy? No | Borrow? Maybe |
| Pages: 176 | Date: September 2013 |
| Publisher: Harper Collins Children's Books | |
| ISBN: 9780007511495 | |
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Time magazine were very perceptive when they put Jeff Kinney on their most influential people lists. Many have been the people to take his snappy, over-illustrated young readers format and sense of humour to produce a franchise of witty, short novels about endearingly self-dismissive Average Joes. But with the signs that the whole thing has branched away from endearing Joes to hopefully endearing dogs, the message is getting clearer and clearer – just too many mimics are now on the shelf.
In this second adventure the five stick-figure dogs are still together, still playing and still hungry. Last time round they just had to snap up some hamburgers. This time they have to snap up some hot dogs from a passing frankfurter cart – and get there before a raccoon with similar intent.
The comedy comes from the ineptitude of the hounds, with complete misreadings of the whole world, and wacky schemes involving helicopter assaults on the hot dog cart. But you don't really get any sense of character beyond the more wise, more astute and therefore hang-dog Stick Dog. The narrator tries for a character, in the Mr Gum fashion of interrupting himself with asides and commentary. He proves to be an anonymous boy narrator, and, er, that's about it. Until he proves to be a regular omniscient narrator, and, er, it just doesn't work.
So all we do have is the surreal mood of the dogs and their plans, and the non sequiturs to be gained from the reading, talking and what-not animals. Their world is portrayed exceedingly simply in the pictures, which do have the look of a talented six-year old, and the whole book with its lined pages is designed to be the product of an Average Joe itself. Our world is played with almost cleverly at times, with the dogs failing to understand humanity's unusual behaviour very well, but it's not enough. I didn't really find anything amusing, and the whole tried just too hard, meaning I – and I'm sure thousands others – will soon turn back to reading about the Average Joes instead.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The Warrior Sheep Go Jurassic by Christopher Russell and Christine Russell is a much more memorable tale of five animals on an adventure. If you need to see how a book designed as the workbook of a young writer really should look, you can do no better than Katie Davies.
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