WORK, DOGS, WORK

A crew comprising cheerful, cartoon-style canines and one cleverly camouflaged cat continues their construction careers in this third entry in an engaging series, following Dig, Dogs, Dig and Build, Dogs, Build (both 2013).

This time, the diligent dogs are working on a highway, both resurfacing a road and creating a new section of highway by blasting through a mountain with explosives. The newly built highway segment ends next to a river, so the dogs magically conjure up the design and materials needed for a new, four-lane bridge. There’s a gap in logic here that cuts out the role of the civil engineer and ignores the necessity of planning a major project of any sort in the real world, but these canine construction workers are so determined and doggone cheerful that their logical lapse must be overlooked. As in the previous volumes, construction vocabulary and geological terms are emphasized in the rhyming text, with a punchy quatrain on each page. Bold, computer-generated illustrations are filled with trucks, machinery, dogs in motion, and lots of gooey substances like asphalt and “mile after mile of / axle-deep muck.”

Big trucks, jovial dogs and snappy rhyming text serve again as the building blocks of another successful entry in this solidly built series.