By Abby Hanlon
Dory is the youngest of three, nobody her size will play with her, so she fills the house with imaginary monsters and friends, and Abby Hanlon draws the book the way Dory sees it, monsters and all.
Dory is six and the youngest of three, and her big brother and sister, Luke and Violet, are done playing with her. So she plays with everyone else: Mary, the monster who lives under her bed, and Mr. Nuggy, a bearded fairy godmother in a nightgown. When Luke and Violet cook up a villain named Mrs. Gobble Gracker to scare Dory into leaving them alone, it backfires completely. Dory decides Mrs. Gobble Gracker is real, and she declares war. She sets traps. She mixes potions. She spends a whole day being a dog. Hanlon draws all of it in loose black-and-white lines that run right into the words, so the monsters sit on the page as plainly as the furniture.
This one's for the child who's tired of being told they're too small. Dory is six and knows it, and the book is on her side the whole way through. If your child is coming off comics and graphic novels, the pictures are why it works. Hanlon draws on nearly every page, and the drawings aren't decoration; they're where the made-up half of the story actually happens. Mary and Mr. Nuggy and Mrs. Gobble Gracker are real because they're drawn, the same bargain a graphic novel makes. The chapters are short, the type is big, and a lot of the funniest bits live in the pictures, so a child who reads with their eyes first has plenty to do. And there are six more Dory books after this one.