Review by Booklist Review
The new Max Spaniel series for beginning readers opens with the words My name is Max./ I am not a dog. / I am a great hunter. I love to hunt dinosaurs. In the yard, Max (who is a dog) declares a twig to be a dinosaur's bone, a football to be its head, a trowel to be a toenail, and so on. Assembling a mass of similar finds, he reconstructs his large-scale model of a dinosaur, a process the cat views with hilarity. When the finished sculpture makes a move toward the cat, though, it flees in terror. Washed with colors, the exaggerated, cartoon-like drawings create a zany mood that energizes and extends the deadpan text. Beginning readers will like the simple look of the text, with relatively few words on each double-page spread and most of them monosyllabic (with the notable but easy-to-remember exception of dinosaur). Plenty of pre-readers will enjoy the story and its comical illustrations as well.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
