The Return of Rex and Ethel - Hardcover

Arnold Adoff is the recipient of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children for the body of his work. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. To learn more, please visit www.arnoldadoff.com.

Grade 2-4-Rex and Ethel "have been neighbor dogs/all of their short-legged lives." They belong to Pepper and Belle, who "have been neighbor girls/all of their long-legged lives." Adoff constructs his narrative in poetic segments to tell first of the growing years of the girls and dogs and then of the final hot summer in which Rex and Ethel die and the friends undertake a memorial project, a well-stocked shelter for wild animals. Old dogs may fade away, but here they come back as surreal ghosts hovering around their beloved owners until the shelter is completed. Deeter provides plentiful details in full-page scenes and vignettes that feature the two children-one Asian and one Caucasian-and the two dogs-a Boston terrier and a pug. There's a garish quality to the color sometimes, and the blue phantom dogs, sometimes small and other times larger than life, drifting in outer space or alongside the girls, are unsettling. The story has a detached yet sentimental quality. Pepper and Belle push fallen walnuts into the dogs' grave: "Now walnut saplings will grow between these stones in new seasons./Years of growing trees will join under the ground/with years of Rex and Ethel." Adoff spaces some words irregularly, giving a halting rhythm to the text. It's all a bit stiff and probably more interesting to adults than to children.
Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston
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