Earl & Mooch

Gr 3 Up—Beginning with New Year's Day and traveling through the seasons to the next New Year's Eve, this volume collects a solid year of the "Mutts" daily newspaper strip, featuring the main cat and dog characters. Drawn in a minimalist style with slightly enlarged lettering, the essential structure follows an almost vaudevillian gag format, with the jokes either relying on simple plays on words or easily comestible ideas. The author makes a few contemporary references to environmentalism—and takes a swipe at the current economy—and correctly guesses that his readers might be interested in animal humane issues, dedicating a couple of weeks to animal rescue awareness. Largely this is very much not a sum of its parts, but merely a collection of them. That said, the strip has been around for 16 years, with a loyal following and a number of spin-off children's books, most recently Wag! (Little, Brown, 2009), and will likely find a coterie of readers.—Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH