By Ross Collins
Two dogs who get blamed for every unexplained smell in the house decide to start charging for it.
Whenever there is a pong, a puddle or a poo in the house that nobody can account for, Norman and Ringo get the blame. They always get the blame. That is the job. So they do the obvious thing and go into business: Blamehounds Inc., where any dog anywhere can pay a modest fee to have somebody else take the fall. Business is excellent. Small dogs across the world start owning up to accidents, eruptions and, eventually, the odd war. It gets completely out of hand, which is the whole idea.
Sixty-four pages, cream paper, Barrington Stoke's easy-read font, and Ross Collins drawing on nearly every spread. The words sit at about a seven-year-old's level while the joke is pitched at eight and up, so a nine-year-old who reads slowly gets a book that is funny at their age rather than sweet at somebody else's. And it can be finished in one sitting. For a child who has never once got to the end of a book, that is the entire point of this one — the first experience of closing something and having actually finished it.