Good Dog, Carl : A Classic Board Book

There are few words in this book, so you and your child can talk together about what's happening on each beautifully illustrated page. It is a delight!

The Carl books are wonderful, including this one. They are funny and fictional, as are most of the children's books I share with my son. We read about singing hippos and dancing dinosaurs and farting dogs, so why not a babysitting Rottie (a very sensible and responsible babysitting Rottie, I might add)? I wonder if the significant negative response to these books is due largely to the very realistic style of painting which Alexandra Day uses in her illustrations. Would people be so upset if the same story were illustrated with cartoonish neon-colored characters? I love the paintings that illustrate these books; they are beautifully rendered and a nice change from all the flat cartoons in children's books.

As a children's librarian, I, too, am absolutely outraged about this book! I am outraged that so many people have so little ability to separate reality from fantasy. Folks, if this book is causing problems in your home, may I suggest that you also avoid Amelia Bedelia (dumbest maid in the world), "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs", ALL the Miss Nelson books, The Stupids and, as your child grows up, toss ALL fantasy novels straight out the window. (Goodbye, Dorothy! Goodbye, Chet Gecko!) Of course, for all I know, the people worrying about Carl being left alone to mind a baby actually DO inhabit a world where maids actually draw a picture of the bath when asked to draw a bath, it really DOES rain spaghetti, teachers can fool their students with simple disguises, people are as dumb as the Stupids, animals talk and tornados really do carry little girls away over the rainbow. In which case, instead of being outraged, I am either very jealous or very scared. For everyone else, Carl is a riot to read, cute as can be and your child will have a giggle imagining that a baby and a dog could REALLY get up to that much trouble.

Leave so much to the imagination. This could be a different story about Carl and the baby every single time. I can see a glimmer in my toddler's eye and I can tell he's thinking about how fun it would be if one of our dogs would "babysit" him!!

Five years ago, my sister-in-law tried to convince me that a book about a dog - a rottweiler, no less - who babysits when mother goes out was "wonderful". I was skeptical (at best). (Let me get this straight: the mother puts her baby in the crib and tells the DOG to take care of it? Then the mother LEAVES? That's crazy. That's not a good message. It's a Rottweiler? What was the author thinking?) Once I got to READ the book, though, I fell in love too. I must admit that we contributed a couple of Carl books to my niece's growing library that year. Now we are building a Carl collection for our son, and it's a hit. At 2 years old, he loved to have Daddy read this to him. At 3.5, he reads it to anyone who will sit still. His take on the action is a little different than ours, but it is very imaginative!This is the first of the Carl books. They're all my favorite. I just can't decide. I like to go in order, though. These are not particularly sequential books, but Baby is a little bigger in each book as they go along.I love the open-ended play we get from this book, so that anyone reading it, including your own Baby, can make up the story. The illustrations are fabulous - the action is what our kids have focused on, and the detail is amusing for the older reader on the 112th time through. I recommend this for any small child, especially the 1yo - 4yo crowd. Give it to some lucky family, or get it for yourself!

Beautiful pictures captivate child and adult alike as they tell the adventures of lovable Carl and his small charge. On this day, Carl's job is simply to babysit for an afternoon. What an afternoon it turns out to be for Carl and the baby! Even non-readers can follow Carl's adventures and begin to cultivate a love for books through this creatively told story. Dogs and young children are a perfect combination. After reading this book, you will think the same about books and young children!