Excellent Ed
by Stacy McAnulty; 
illus. by Julia Sarcone-Roach
Primary    Knopf    32 pp.
5/16    978-0-553-51023-2    $16.99
Library ed.  978-0-553-51024-9    $19.99
e-book ed.  978-0-553-51025-6    $10.99

Ed, the beloved dog in the Ellis family, has a bit of an inferiority complex. Each of the five alliteratively named Ellis children has something that he or she is “excellent” at doing: Ernie bakes cupcakes, Elaine plays soccer, Edith dances, and twins Emily and Elmer are math whizzes. Ed, on the other hand, frets about not being allowed to sit on the couch or “use the indoor bathroom,” and the things at which he excels aren’t necessarily desired skills (e.g., “breaking stuff”; “losing stuff”). Worse, he’s not even the best at them. Elaine: “‘I broke the record for most soccer goals in a season!’ Elaine was better at breaking stuff than Ed.” In an affirming twist, the family ends up lauding the special ways Ed enriches their lives because of all the things he isn’t allowed to do (licking food off the floor: “I am an excellent floor cleaner. Maybe that’s why I don’t eat at the table?”), and he achieves his own kind of excellence through the special place he occupies in their loving home. McAnulty’s playful text takes pains, without being self-conscious about it, to shake up gender norms, and although their race is unspecified in the text, Sarcone-Roach illustrates the Ellises as a family of color. The mixed-media illustrations, too, excel at communicating the family’s warmth and lighten Ed’s identity crisis with humor and vitality. In a word? Excellent.

From the May/June 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.