By Fiona Watt
The board book that kicked off Usborne's whole touchy-feely series. One wrong puppy after another, each wrong for a reason your baby can feel with a single finger, until the right one shows up.
That's not my puppy, its ears are too soft. Turn the page. That's not my puppy, its collar is too shiny. Its nose is too rough. Its paws are too bumpy. Its coat is too hairy. Every spread is one wrong puppy with one patch of something set into the page, and your baby's finger heads straight for the patch each time. Then at the end there's the right puppy, and it's the right one because its tongue is lovely and soft. A small white mouse is tucked somewhere on every page too, which is the thing a two-year-old will spot and be very pleased about. Fiona Watt wrote it in 1999, and it was the first of what is now more than seventy of these.
The pattern is the point. Same sentence, same shape, one thing different each time. After three or four turns your child knows what's coming and starts saying the words along with you, and that rhythm is how the language goes in before they can talk. The patches also give them a job on every page, so nobody has to sit still. It's board card rather than paper, so the pages are genuinely sturdy, and the textured patches are pressed into the board instead of glued on top, which means they hold up under a determined baby far better than anything stuck to a page would. It's a short book with a small aim and it hits that aim cleanly. The series has sold more than thirty million copies since 1999.