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Chris Riddell is an illustrator and a cartoonist (he works for ''The Observer'' amongst others) as well as the creator of ''The Edge Chronicles'' and the graphic side of ''Ottoline and The Yellow Cat'' is outstanding. The book is beautifully produced, with gold embossing on the red-dominated cover, semi-gloss, quality paper, carefully chosen, sophisticated type, a Royal Postcard Collection add-on in the back, and of course the illustrations themselves, black and white pen drawings using an occasional splash of red for emphasis. I loved the illustrations: quirky would be the word to apply if it wasn't so clichéd, with fantastic detail, spot-on characterisation and plenty of exploration text embedded in the pictures, used as captions and in speech bubbles . The Big City of Ottoline's is very reminiscent of Sendak's night city from ''In the Night Kitchen'' - or so thought my daughter aged 5, although the style is definitely Riddell's own.

The adventure is rather mild (and I couldn't help being reminded of one of the Hercules Poirot stories which also involved lapdogs) but diverting enough, but fundamentally it's just a pretext to present the milieu and the details of the strange life of Ottoline, well loved by her travelling parents but sometimes rather lonely in her big collections' filled apartment (and by no means a super-hero) is interesting in itself. Mr Munroe is an important part of the story, and there is a nice lesson about friendship there too.