3 & up)Ĭontinuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long ( The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud.

The image of a happy dog treading water with a frog on his head says it all. The author provides the perfect amount of humor to keep things from getting too heavy, and Muth’s astounding watercolors lend incredible depth, guiding readers easily from emotion to emotion as well as from season to season. Just when readers may find themselves reaching for the tissues, a new friend shows up for the dog in this smart and subtle meditation on life, love and loss. Fall becomes a time for slowing down, and then in winter City Dog’s friend disappears, an event foreshadowed in fall by a gentle image of the frog’s “hand” resting on the sleeping dog.

A picture book of this length could feel endless, but this glides along as the friends share country-frog and city-dog pastimes in spring and summer. The book follows the friends through the seasons. In Willems’s latest, a departure from his urban sensibility as well as his first book as solely the author, a dog from the city explores new territory when he moves to the country and befriends a frog.

City dog country frog