Bean Dog and Nugget: The Ball, and: Bean Dog and Nugget: The Cookie by Charise Mericle Harper (review)

Harper (Fashion Kitty, BCCB 12/05, etc.) opens her latest young readers’ graphic novel series with two accessibly simple and pleasantly silly tales. Bean Dog (who, despite the name, more closely resembles a Nutter Butter than a bean, a dog, or a hot dog) and Nugget, a small, round creature with stick arms and a hair bow, are good pals who like to tease each other. In The Ball, a game of catch goes awry when Bean Dog’s shiny new ball rolls into the big, scary bushes, and the two friends transform into Superdog and Ninja Nugget to retrieve their toy. In The Cookie, they argue over who gets the biggest half of the last cookie after a game of playing with an invisible donut leaves them hungry. Sequential paneling and uncluttered white backgrounds (touched occasionally grays and muted pinks) make the action easy to follow. The story is told entirely through Bean Dog and Nugget’s dialogue, with plenty of repetitive vocabulary to build up the confidence of young readers, while the occasional use of bigger words will prove a worthy challenge for others. The themes—overcoming fears, sharing—are relatable but not overplayed, and there’s a charming wackiness to the whole endeavor.