The Dog Walk

In Nordqvist’s (A Ruckus in the Garden) wordless adventure, a shaggy dog pulls a white-skinned child out the door of an elderly figure’s house and into a world of elaborately detailed, fanciful environments, with the child’s bright red baseball cap serving as a wayfinder for readers. After a train ride on a loopy, Escher-like track, the pair traverse a series of surreal outdoor venues, including a park where an oversize kangaroo, insects, and a light-skinned mustached giant give humanoid visitors rides. Tugged through waterside spreads, a townscape, and a cityscape, the child follows the canine through stuffed-to-the-gills interiors, one an antique shop and the next emulating a child’s playroom. Not all of the scenes are benign—an eerie castle drawn in cutaway style reveals dimly lit halls with large, ominously empty shackles—but the child and dog persevere, even making it through a town populated entirely by cats, and arrive back at the house as evening falls. Some may find the unpredictable sense of scale unsettling, but the ink, watercolor, and acrylic drawings have the genteel elegance and wide-ranging imagination of classic fairy tale illustration and will reward multiple readings. Ages 3–7. (Oct.)