Why did you decide to have these layers of narration? Robert writes stories, and the narrative culminates with Betty telling him a long tale that turns out to be true. “Detective Dog” revolves, in a way, around storytelling. Then it was speaking truth to power.”Īmong Betty’s many privileges is not only knowing how to code-switch but being able to joke about it. And while her family is nonwhite-and discriminated against-they are hardly underprivileged.īetty says to herself, “In Hong Kong, there was no People of Color club because they were all the same color, and if you said bad things about white people it wasn’t racism, it was resistance, unless you said it to their faces. For Betty, similarly, “people of color” suggests the underprivileged. When I was growing up, my mother used to say, “I don’t like that word ‘immigrant.’ ” She never explained what she meant, but I knew: to her, an immigrant was someone who didn’t have real suitcases and took live chickens on buses. When the nine-year-old Robert joins the People of Color club at his school, for example, his mother, Betty, wants to tell him, “We are not people of color, Robert. Books about dinosaurs, books about space and even books about dogs - Nell loves them all! But one day Peter and Nell arrive at school to find all the books have disappeared! Who could have taken them, and why? Luckily, Detective Dog Nell, with help from the whole class, is ready to sniff out the thief! Written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by the multi-talented illustrator and print-maker Sara Ogilvie, The Detective Dog is a fast-paced celebration of books, reading, libraries and the relationship between a little boy and his rather special dog.Your story “ Detective Dog” centers on a wealthy Hong Kong family who moved, to escape the violent protests of 2014, first to Vancouver and then to New York, where they construe many things differently than most Americans might. When she's not cracking cases, Nell goes to school with Peter and listens to the children read. Her ever-sniffing nose is always hard at work solving mysteries and finding all Peter's lost toys. Peter's dog Nell has an amazing sense of smell.

She was known far and wide as Detective Dog Nell. There once was a dog with a keen sense of smell. When a crime needs solving, there's only one dog for the job! Join Nell the Detective and help solve the mystery of the missing books.

The detective dog book