Harry the Dirty Dog, by Gene Zion and Illustrations by Margaret Bloy Graham - Picturebook

I was a child who loved to play in the mud growing up. My mother would pick me up from school and ask me, on a daily basis, if I had been playing in a pigsty. Well, I really wasn’t sure what a pigsty was, so I naturally said yes each time and she would naturally smile and laugh at me each time. Still, I loved my baths! I had toys for the bath that would rival any “dry-world” toy box. Being dirty was good for the day, but at night, I wanted to feel clean in my sheets to drift into dreamland.

Just like I grew up with the dirt, I grew up with Harry, the Dirty Dog. This was one of my books that I had in my bookshelf growing up (my parents did pretty well at picking this one out for me) and I just purchased a newer, 50th Anniversary Edition of it. I love dogs and had six growing up. Yes, six; three inside (all poodles) and three outside (bigger dogs). Now I have two adorable dogs (lab/retrievers) that live inside and unlike Harry, they love their baths.

Harry is great, because he personifies a small child wanting to play for the day and finally go home at night with his family. How clever of a character Harry is when he steals the scrubbing brush, buries it, and goes out on the town for some fun. Children love the idea of a white dog with black spots becoming so dirty that he turns into a black dog with white spots. Little ones will laugh with glee, because they know how dirty he is and probably have been in this situation themselves. This book also reminds be of The Great Gracie Chase, Stop That Dog, by Cynthia Rylant. Both dogs are pampered and when they don’t get their way they decide to take on the world by themselves. However, they do want to be able to come home in the evening and be loved by their families. And after all, why shouldn’t they?

The illustrations are simple, yet child-friendly. There are not any elaborate colors that we see with some picturebooks, but that is alright. I mean, we are working with a very dirty dog here. I don’t think that shiny trucks and glimmering streets would work out well with these pictures. Some of the illustrations are full page layouts and some are only one page layouts, but all the written words are at the bottom. I particularly like the pictures of Harry playing tag with the other dogs around a construction zone and then sliding down a coal chute. The coal chute really dates this book, though, making it believable that it was originally copyrighted in 1956. Yet, the main theme still remains, dogs can be mischievous no matter what age in history and can still be loved by their owners, no matter how dirty they get.