No, Dog, NO!

I love P.D. Eastman's drawings. The book I remember from childhood is "A Fly Went By." That book is weird enough, so I'll get to it later, but I had never read "Go, Dog, Go!" until recently. The drawings are equally as charming as those in "A Fly Went By," but this book is seriously messed up.

There's no premise, no story, and the inhabitants of the pages seem to live in an entirely dog populated world, in which dogs are spend almost all their time racing from one place to another while periodically insulting the sartorial choices of other dogs.

At first glance, this seems like a book that is teaching our young minds about words: identification, opposites, colors. The first exchange between two of the characters, however, is a complete nonsequitur:

"Hello!"
"Hello!"
"Do you like my hat?"
"I do not."
"Good-by!"
"Good-by!"

What the hell? What have you learned, children? That it's OK to say what you are thinking, no matter what? That's probably not helpful in the long run.

Dog Number One tries four more times, and Dog Number Two does not like Dog Number One's hat until the very end when Dog Number One has an item on her head that can only have come from ingesting some funny Milk Bones.

The dogs race around until they climb up a ladder to the top of a tree where they have a free-for-all dog party. "A dog party! A big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs, red dogs, blue dogs, yellow dogs, green dogs, black dogs, and white dogs are all at a dog party! What a dog party!"

This is a book for morning until early afternoon. It's like coffee on paper and should not be consumed before bedtime.

"Good-by!"
"Good-by!"