Baby Book Reviews: Where’s Spot?

Rating: 4.5/5 Baby's rating: 5/5

Where's Spot is a classic of children's literature, and my daughter's first favourite book. The first motor skills she learned were turning its thick board pages and lifting the flaps on the missing puppy's potential hiding places. While it's no longer her top pick at 12 months old, Where's Spot has consistently delighted her since her third month of life. It delights me too — for its cute illustrations, engaging flaps, mounting tension, and its subtle hinting at the inevitable failure of Utopian ideals and violent revolution.

What is truly engaging about this book is not the mystery of which hiding place Spot has chosen (spoiler: he's in the basket), but the questions that the narrative artfully ignores: where are the house's human occupants, and what are these animals — most of them extremely dangerous — doing there?

In many children's books these questions are easily dismissed — anthropomorphic creatures of all species interact with nary a raised eyebrow in your typical board book. But in Where's Spot? they demand particular attention. Aside from their ability to speak (almost exclusively the word "no", suggesting the difficulty of attempting human language with bestial vocal cords), the animals are barely anthropomorphized. And the house is clearly built by creatures with opposable thumbs to something approximating human scale (although Sally does appear to be an unusually large dog; more on that later). Furthermore, Sally and Spot eat dog food out of bowls— and the fact that they've been recently filled points to the likelihood that humans have at least recently been around.

Here's a brief rundown of the house's deadlier occupants and their hiding places:

• Behind the door: a bear (species not specified, but proportions indicate grizzly)
• Inside the clock: a very large snake, at least four metres long
• Inside the piano: a hippopotamus (with its oxpecker bird)
• Under the stairs: a lion
• In the wardrobe: a chimpanzee
• Under the bed: a crocodile

What unites these hiding places is that they are all excellent ambush positions from which any of the above creatures could surprise and eliminate the house's human occupants. Meanwhile, the group's more docile members, the penguins and the tortoise, are hiding in the box and under the rug respectively — places where they are unlikely to be found should things go south when the attack begins. And thus we have the underlying context for this story: an animal uprising modeled on Orwell's Animal Farm.

Sally is the natural choice for an animal uprising. Her life-long cohabitation with humans makes her familiar with their habits and their weaknesses, and her unusually large stature helps to maintain her position as leader among an army of wild animals. And the higher intelligence that comes with millennia of domestication gives her the vision to plan for an egalitarian post-revolution society.

She has only one weakness: her puppy.

While the real story surely begins much earlier, the narrative begins with Sally, having finished her final meal as a slave, realizing that her son Spot is missing. She begins searching in her troops' hiding places. She remains stoic in the presence of these deadly wild animals , but the tension mounts as the search progresses, and every "no" a reminder that despite her prowess and position, she cannot ensure the safety of her child. The very possibility that he may be in danger is a quiet threat to her position as the proverbial alpha dog in this unlikely army, and the nagging knowledge that these creatures were never meant to live together.

After questioning all of her combat troops, realizing she can't trust them, she questions her remaining allies, until finally the tortoise tells her to check the basket — where it turns out Spot had been hiding all along. The tension is broken and Spot returns to happily enjoy his last meal as a kept animal, but the shadow of this incident, however brief, and the fundamental mistrust it reveals between the general and her soldiers, looms over the narrative, and the reader understands that the utopia that Sally has planned can never truly come to fruition.

Note also that the Animal Farm parallels extend further with sequels like Spot Goes to the Farm, where, like Orwell's pigs, Spot's family have subjugated the other species, abandoning their egalitarian ideals to simply usurp the humans' position (and become ever more like them themselves).

A loves Where's Spot?, and rarely passes up a chance to read it. From me it receives a nearly perfect score, save for the fragility of its flaps: after nine months of reading, teething, and uncoordinated baby strength, I fear that Where's Spot? will soon be more tape than book. But I fully support her repeated readings, and the same goes for any small child, for it is important for children to learn about the tenuousness of power and the inherent hopelessness in trying to change things. 4.5/5.