A DOG FEELS LIKE SITTING

An Argentinian import about a dog who simply feels like sitting—and then doesn’t.

Poet Wapner’s brief text traces a dog’s somewhat restless yet inert existence: He sits, he feels, and he sits again while his owner sits nearby, buried in a book. Originally published in Spanish, the book reads more like a meditation than a narrative. As a poem, the text has a quiet, circular charm, but readers expecting any kind of story—a walk, a ball, a bone—will wait in vain; the emotional arc amounts to sitting, then not sitting, which may leave young readers wanting. Isol’s art is the book’s strongest suit. The dog—a plump, creamy white figure outlined in loose, expressive charcoal black—is irresistible: simultaneously dopey and soulful, ancient and puppyish. The palette is minimalist, with the human figure rendered in the same crisp white and black as the dog, anchored by warm amber-orange floors and flat teal walls. Perspective shifts do the heavy narrative lifting: One spread pulls back to show the dog looking smallish; another pushes in so close that the dog’s broad white back fills the entire page; a third zooms in to just the owner’s eyes peering over an orange book.

Charming to look at yet thin on story.