My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks and Other Funny Family Portraits (review)

A little girl tackling a school assignment explains a new artistic approach to the book's audience as she creates portraits of her family members. Her technique involves describing someone with four or five concrete similes ("My daddy is as jumpy as a SPRING and as playful as a SPINNING TOP"), then creating a picture from the specific objects in the figures of speech: Daddy's eyebrows are springs, his nose is a top, his mouth is a knotted length of rope ("because sometimes he's as stubborn as a KNOT in a ROPE"), and so on. This offers some interesting possibilities for assignments blending the language and visual arts; the book is particularly effective at contrasting the initial line drawings of the girl's family members, which are energetic but conventional, with the vivid and creative photographic portraits wherein included realia lift a basic painted shape into three-dimensional hypersilliness. The book's story is largely superfluous, though, and the narrator's voice isn't credible; the portraits vary somewhat in creativity, and these would be mighty expensive projects to do well on any classroom-sized scale. Nonetheless, this could spark some imaginative discussion or just add some sparkle to classic family-portrait assignments.