Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman: Show’s Over by Jamie Michalak (review)

Ruff Ruffman, doggy star of the PBS Kids show Fetch!, jumps on to the early chapter book scene in these short adventures. First, his “fancy pants” go missing, and then he receives a fax stating that he’s been fired. Ruff assumes the “Ha Ha” signature on the fax belongs to Harriet Hackensack, the Australian entrepreneur who just bought the TV station that airs his show and who hates dogs. Alongside Blossom, his laconic feline show supervisor, Ruff constructs a green-energy submarine doghousemobile to confront Hackensack, a plan that backfires until Blossom saves the day. Meanwhile, it turns out that the fancy pants were stolen by Ruff’s archenemy, so they are then remotely destructed to cause the now-pantsless archenemy maximum embarrassment. This hits the right marks with respect to chapter length, print size, and goofy appeal to make transitional readers comfortable, and the familiar media face is likely to snag a broad audience. However, the science content is overplayed, being limited in actuality to a couple of facts tossed out by Blossom and the nicely designed activity about buoyancy in the end matter, and plot points stray willy-nilly. The highly saturated digital illustrations that closely follow the TV show’s animation style are also uneven, with some of them evincing interesting dimensionality, but others disappointingly flat and repetitive. There are likely to be kids who find Ruff in a patched-up pink cat costume an attention-grabber, though, and there’s a dearth of comical science books for this level, so this might see some play as a springboard to more in-depth scientific sleuthing for students looking for diversion more than experimentation.