Ball by Mary Sullivan (review)

This one-word picture book follows the adventures and dreams of a dog from the time his young mistress wakes up to when she returns from school. Our single-minded canine hero revels in a game of fetch with his beloved red ball until his girl has to depart. While she's gone, he hopefully brings the ball to the little girl's mother, baby sister, and cat, but all in vain; he then dozes off, dreaming ball-themed dreams, and not long after he reawakens, the girl returns and they're back at their game again. Though the dream sequence is a needless diversion, the story's tight comic focus and surprisingly eventful narrative make it absorbing and appealing for youngsters, and the single word "Ball," which appears in speech balloons for the girl and thought balloons for the dog, is effectively imbued with a range of emotion. The illustrations are composed of pencil linework with digital coloring, mostly in warm golds and peaches that allow the red ball to stand out; scenes are generally bordered in panels that have informal, sketchy borders that could be either decorative or amiably moth-eaten. Those words pretty much cover our pooch protagonist, too—a squat, well-fed little critter with a pokey snout, he's endearingly real in his eager lack of beauty, and Sullivan deftly captures doggy poses that run the spectrum from ecstasy to dejection. While this could also be treated as a picture book, this will be a natural decode-alone for kids who are accustomed to parsing pictures, and they'll delight in the ability to read it all themselves.