The Chase

PreS-Gr 1–Against a wide expanse of sandy beach, a girl holds a ball and stands facing an eager Jack Russell terrier. “Are you ready? Are you steady?” she asks. Then, with the turn of the page, she calls “FETCH!” and sends the ball arcing across the page. The dog scampers after it and is immediately joined by a growing crowd of fellow dogs, the wide variety of breeds, including a Great Dane, a Dalmatian, a pug, a poodle, a dachshund, and a border collie. Bloomfield takes the familiar ritual of throwing a ball for a dog and heightens it to a delightful degree, as the pack zips through the main street of a little town, up into a construction site, down a zigzagging cliff trail alongside a waterfall, and finally back to the beach, ready for a second throw. This wild journey is anchored with thoughtful book design choices, most notably a few experimental divisions and orientations of the page. Some compositions split the spread into upper and lower horizontal strips, accentuating the dogs’ forward momentum, while others require the book to be rotated 90 degrees and read vertically downward as the pack descend a fire escape or a hilly path. Soft, pale-hued pen, pencil, and digital art defines just enough of the background to give readers a sense of the environment as the dogs bound around a museum, across a hoisted metal girder, and through a park gazebo. Bloomfield highlights the exuberant canine shenanigans with lighthearted rhyming text (“It’s a hustle, a bustle, a running tussle”) but wisely avoids locking into a rigid meter, the loose rhythm mimicking a dog’s shifting, freeform energy.