Safari Pug: The Dog Who Walked on the Wild Side by Laura James

James, L. (2017). Safari pug: the dog who walked on the wild side. (E. Ceulemans, Illus.) Bloomsbury Children's Books.

This book can be categorized as something between a Level Three book and a Transitional Level book though it leans closer to the Transitional Level. The book includes chapters that span up to fifteen pages and tell their own short stories with simple plots like understanding a nightmare and getting tickets for the safari. Each problem introduced is resolved by the end of the chapter, but they still leave a lingering idea to encourage children to read on to the next chapter. The illustrations are not completely black and white but are also not full color either. They are a unique mix of this being mainly grayscale with the inclusion of yellow and green to give the images a little more life and math the safari theme. The typeface is large and there are a few spreads with only text or very minimal pictures. One spread is three quarters filled with text with a simple image of the pug looking at footprints. It’s a cute little addition to keep the page from looking intimidating by including large blocks of text. This text also includes heightened vocabulary and humor, though the misunderstanding that can come from this may also be because of the English culture influence this book has.

Speaking of the text, the form and content are part of the reason I cannot fully put this book on the Transitional Level. The lines per page never exceed fifteen and the amount of words never exceeds eight. There is never more than one spread without illustrations, though like I mentioned, some of these illustrations are small and minimal. There are many large illustrations in the book as well though they don’t appear as much as the smaller images. With all the combined characteristics of this book, it is clear that it aligns closer to the Transitional Level though there are some aspects that lean more towards Level Three.