Dan White

Traditional

This is a good short book to use as a refresher to help you remember some of the common games you can play with your dog. I will admit i never thought about swimming therapy for my older dog -but then my dogs are bulldogs and because of their physical design and bone density they dont usually swim well. There was no mention that some breeds might not be physically suited to swimming. But playing in the water (knee deep) could be a fun puppy game even still. It was an okay book… (more)

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley.)

Cindy is a scrappy little latchkey kid with an overactive imagination, which is forever landing her in trouble. She daydreams of monsters when she should be paying attention in class, and disappears into the woods surrounding her house well into the evening, much to her mom's exasperation.

Cindy and her ever-loyal best friend Biscuit get into all sorts of adventures, most of which involve saving the world: from aliens, werewolves, mummified mermaids, abominable snowmen, swamp ghosts, inter-dimensional monsters, you name it. When the one-eyed creature who has been haunting Cindy's dreams pulls Cindy and Biscuit into its world, the girl and her pup go missing IRL. Can our heroes find their way back home?

Even though there is a main plot here, CINDY AND BISCUIT: VOLUME 1 feels more like a collection of loosely connected vignettes, some only a few pages long. The different stories are somewhat interesting, and give White a chance to showcase a variety of Big Bads (my favorite are the sentient snowman who hunts down his creator, i.e., Cindy, and an altercation with an abominable snowman that ends in a snowball fight ... not to mention the werewolf with a heart of gold).

CINDY AND BISCUIT has two things going for it: White's spectacular (and spectacularly creepy) artwork and, of course, a dog. (I am forever a sucker for a canine sidekick.)

On the downside, the collection feels a bit ... loose? Like it could use a tighter plot to weave all its brilliantly colored threads together.… (more)

The book was well researched and written in an engaging style. But for such a long and detailed work, I thought a number of angles on -- perhaps decades of-- modern-day camping were overlooked. For example, the back-to-the-land movement was essentially camping on steroids. White is speaking to the motorhome crowd, it seems. Granted I lost patience and didn't continue reading as closely as necessary to fully absorb his message, but my sense was that the author jumped from roughing it to motor homes. He could've also included the vast army of homeless people in the US who are camping out of necessity.… (more)