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|title=Harry the Dirty Dog

|author=Gene Zion

|buy=Yes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=30

|publisher=Red Fox

|isbn=0099978709

}}

Harry is a lovely little white dog with black spots, but Harry is also a Dirty Dog. He likes most things but he doesn't like the bath any more than Sixer does. So, when he hears the taps running, he steals the scrubbing brush, buries it in the back garden in his special hiding place, and, just to make absolutely, very, most certainly sure he's avoided all ablutions, runs away from home. Harry has great fun while he's running away because most things are an adventure to him. Bath forgotten, he plays with the men mending the road and gets rather dirty from the tarmac, he plays by the railway and gets even dirtier from the fumes, and he has a great game of tag with the other dogs getting dirtier still with all the mud in the fields. Finally he finds a coal lorry and slides down its chute getting himself the dirtiest of all. He's now a black dog with not very many white spots at all. He's also a hungry dog, and a tired one, and he's beginning to worry that his family will think he's really run away, forever.

He rushes home, for food, bed and reassurance, only to find that no one recognises him. He tries to show the family it's him, Harry, and he does all his special tricks - he "flop flips", "flip flops", plays dead, rolls over, dances and barks, but still no one realises that it's him. Harry's beginning to worry that fun as his adventure was, maybe he should have thought a little harder first, and he slinks away sadly to ponder his next move. Suddenly an idea occurs to him and he rushes to the garden and begins to dig feverishly. When he's found what he's looking for he bounds into the house and upstairs. The family find him sitting in the bath, holding in his mouth the scrubbing brush he buried earlier. After a good, soapy scrubbing he is revealed: "It's Harry! It's Harry!" cry the children happily, and all is right again in Harry's world:

Written by Gene Zion and illustrated by Margery Bloy Graham, Harry looks perky and mischievous; his whole head is tilted upwards, drawing your eye to that little, black, inquisitive nose of his which is always in search of something new, something exciting, and something he's bound to enjoy. Harry's always so busy, just as children are, and to him the world is a enjoyable, happy place, just as it is to most children. In fact, all the characters in Harry the Dirty Dog are drawn with an air of infectious enthusiasm. Just looking at them makes you start to smile. They're busy pictures but not too detailed, drawn with confident, exuberant strokes. The backgrounds are gentle and blurry with but plenty of white space, drawing your children's eyes straight to Harry and his deeds, moving them along with the narrative, but with enough detail to make a story book as well as a picture book, suitable for for talking about long after the reading is over and for the way that little ones like to tell the story again to themselves from the illustrations.

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