Roxbury Park Dog Club #1: Mission Impawsible

by Daphne Maple, Annabelle Metayer (Illustrator)

Overview

What’s better than being best friends? Being best friends who volunteer together at the Roxbury Park Dog Shelter! With a focus on friendship, family, and cute canines, Roxbury Park Dog Club is perfect for tween readers who snap up books from series like Cupcake Diaries and Candy Apple, or for anyone who loves dogs.

This first book follows Kim, who’s great with dogs. She’s the only person who can get her neighbors’ dog, a sweet but lazy basset hound named Humphrey, to go on his daily walk, and she makes it look so easy that her brother calls her the dog whisperer. So she can’t wait to start her seventh grade volunteer project: working at the Roxbury Park Dog Shelter. But the shelter is running out of money and might have to shut down…unless Kim and her friends Sasha and Taylor can save it!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062327673
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

Editorial Reviews

03/01/2016
Gr 3–6—This new series begins with simultaneous releases of the first two books featuring best friends and dog enthusiasts Kim, Sasha, and Taylor. Mission Impawsible is presented from "dog whisperer" Kim's point of view. The seventh-grade girls are assigned volunteer work after school a few days each week and find a perfect opportunity in a failing dog shelter. With some creativity, dedication, and very hard work, Kim learns she has the ability to engender real change as she and her friends establish the Roxbury Park Dog Club to save the shelter. When the Going Gets Ruff is presented from Sasha's point of view. Sasha is determined to prove to her mother that she is responsible enough to have her very own pet, but everything she tries goes wrong. When Sasha briefly loses a dog from the Dog Club, she is certain she's done for. Ultimately, however, she learns the true meaning of responsibility—with a little help from her friends—and might just find her perfect furry companion. While well paced and engaging, these series starters are unfortunately unremarkable. The Dog Club's problems are slight, and conflicts resolve easily. Reminiscent of Ann M. Martin's "The Baby-Sitters Club" series (Scholastic) but with less substance, these titles don't offer anything new to the pet-fiction genre. However, if readers are hungry for more friendship and doggy reads, this series might be worth the venture. VERDICT Strictly an additional purchase; recommend for those libraries with readers clamoring for more quick, dog-themed reads.—Taylor Worley, Springfield Public Library, OR

School Library Journal

2016-03-02
In the first of a new series, seventh-grader Kim combines her talent and enthusiasm for working with animals with her need to undertake a community service project for school. She and her BFF, Sasha, are volunteering at a small local animal shelter. Kim's vision for this experience is nearly spoiled when she discovers that Sasha's new friend, Taylor, will be joining them, leaving her feeling "like a third wheel." Taylor is described as "a tall girl with brown skin and a hundred little braids that ended in silver beads," in contrast to floppy-haired white girls Kim and Sasha. Kim's formulaic, jealousy-fueled struggles with the change in relationships are neatly, completely resolved when she uses her dog-whisperer skills to help Taylor deal with her fear of the larger animals, effectively eliminating that dog-eared conflict, but two others emerge. Kim struggles with her grades, threatening her work at the shelter, and more critically, the shelter is in financial trouble. Her scheme for an after-school dog club provides, improbably, the needed income stream, and her emerging sense of competence from navigating the bumps of a new business helps her out with schoolwork. Clunky back-story exposition, Kim's unconvincing, authorial first-person voice, flat, predictable, and even stereotypical characters—Taylor's dad is "famous" for his Southern-fried chicken and greens—all combine to create an unexceptional, vanilla-flavored outing. Book 2, When the Going Gets Ruff, publishes simultaneously.Perhaps this effort will appeal to pet lovers. (Fiction. 9-12)

Kirkus Reviews