Review Detail

I love Falatko's Two Dogs in a Trench Coat middle grade series, and have to say that I am not the most enormous fans of picture books. They're often just silly and twee, and when my own children were small, I was often guilty of rearranging the stories to make them more interesting to ME. Falatko does this for discerning adults who want to be able to chuckle at books that they have to read night after night, and I appreciate that. There are plenty of highfalutin' vocab words, too, which is excellent; my daughter was routinely using the word "ostensibly" by the time she was four!

Young readers will find plenty of out and out goofiness in the story, but it's also a good book to introduce conversations about applying for jobs! How could Cow have advertised the job more effectively? What qualifications would you want in a rooster? I loved how the help Wanted sign was updated every day a candidate was deemed unworthy!

The illustrations go well with the text, and have plenty of bright colors and exuberant details in the background. I love Cow's topknot, and in her overalls, she looks a little bit like my paternal grandmother! Stegmaier successfully anthropomorphizes the animals so that I really believed they could be running the farm. The rooster's denim jacket is inspired!

Even as the world gets further away from our agrarian past, books set on farms hold their appeal. While there are plenty of versions of The Little Red Hen or Old McDonald's Farm to fill the need for traditional information about farms, there need to be books for those of us who want a little snarky along with the traditional red barn. Herd Help Wanted: One Rooster into a pen with Donaldson's A Squash and a Squeeze, Cronin and Lewin's Click Clack Moo Cows That Type, Schertle and McElmurry's Little Blue Truck, or Shaw's Sheep in a Jeep series, which was always a massive hit in my house.