This opens straight into the story, and that’s not entirely a good thing as when I finished and flipped back to the start I found it had started on the third page.

I have mixed feelings over the layout. On one hand the illustrations are beautiful, pencil and watercolour style in a muted realistic style and full colour. On the other, the layout is landscape with the text embedded in the images, and the text is absolutely tiny. I virtually had my nose pressed to my PC screen to read it, and I can’t imagine what it would be like on a Kindle. It can’t be resized through the Kindle interface and when I enlarged text using your browser the formatting fails, creating places (e.g. on page four) where two lines of text are overlaid, making it very difficult to read.

The story is about Emily, Cotton, and Spike, three dogs. Cotton is new to the area, on holiday with her owners, but when Spike steals Emily’s frisbee he uses it to get her involved in helping him bully Cotton. The story is about Emily learning to stand up for other people and not to be a bully. If this is a ‘message’ book, then there is one problem with the message: Emily never stands on her own two feet. First she follows Spike, then she follows Emerson when he tries to stop the bullying. The message is less “don’t be a bully” than “don’t bully people who have other people standing up for them as they might be interesting”.

I can’t critique the writing or story fully as in order to get the text large enough to read some lines were overlaid. There is a lot of after-matter, but I couldn’t get the text large enough to read it, which is a great shame because the illustrations are as I said before, top-rate.

It might be great read with mum and dad, but mum and dad are going to need a magnifying glass.