WHERE BONE?

A pet dog named Balthazar, unaware that a tasty bone sits underneath the pillow it rests upon, dreams of bones and wakes with a mission: “Gonna getcha bone.”

The dog looks outdoors and indoors, wreaking havoc inside the elegant home. Despite reminders to itself to “keep calm,” the dog panics, leaving a mess in its wake and even flooding the house after frantically searching in the bathroom. Weary from the frenzied search, Balthazar manages to make it across the now-destroyed interior of the home back to the bed to happily reunite with the bone that was there all along. The way in which the humans will react to the extended destruction is left to the imaginations of readers. The cutesy way in which Balthazar speaks (“Bone? must be home-home” and “dear Bone, it really you!”) becomes tiresome, and exceedingly busy and cluttered spreads may occasionally make it difficult for readers to follow the action, though they do capture Balthazar’s frenzy. Some of the renderings of Balthazar are jarring, even alarming. In one illustration, the dog struggles to stay afloat in the flooding bathroom; its right eye is distorted and protruding, its left eye brown and bruised-looking, its facial features twisted, and its teeth bared on only the right side of its face (Batman’s Two-Face has nothing on Balthazar).

A discordant, one-note story that can’t seem to find its funny bone.