HERE, DUKE!

Duke was a beautiful Irish setter acquired by the Dunning family on the occasion of young Margaret's ninth birthday. Their rollicking adventures with Duke are described in eleven short episodes which can be read separately. The first big job of training the irrepressible Duke, of conditioning him against truck chasing, of changing his cating habits, of ransoming him from the dog pound, of finding treasure in the sea are all part of a new life for an enthusiastic poppy starved group. The topic is extremely popular with pet lovers, the illustrations are wonderfully comic but the author's style, which veers from simple expository sentences to the insertion of more difficult vocabulary, is too uneven to fully reflect the exuberance of the subject.