Mim and the Disastrous Dog Show

Katrina Nannestad

Cheryl Orsini

ABC Books, 2023

256pp., pbk., RRP $A14.99

9780733342240

Imagine being a young girl travelling the world in an old wooden caravan pulled by a horse that decides where they will go and which seems to have magical powers that mean borders and mountains and oceans are no barriers.  And that caravan is full of books, because it, too, has a magic that means that it is like a Tardis with so much more on the inside than appears on the outside. 

That is the life of 10-year-old Miriam-Rose Cohen (who prefers Mim), her father and little brother Nat, Coco the cockatoo and Flossy the horse.  They travel to wherever they are needed, wherever there is a child in need of a book to make their world right again because “the line between books and real life is not as clear as people suppose.”

This time, in the fourth episode of this intriguing series for young independent readers, Mim has arrived in the picturesque Cotswolds, in England just in time for a dog show. But the judge, Lord Melville-Timms, is in a pickle. He has judged cakes and flowers and vegetables, but never dogs. And his bulldog, Bubbles, is shamefully disobedient! Mim knows they’re here to help Lord Melville-Timms. To give him courage. To prevent a dog-show disaster.  If only she can find Lord Melville-Timms the right book. If only Dad would stop giving him the wrong book.

Put “bookshop” in the title of a book and you’ve got me – and, I suspect, many others. Young readers will delight in meeting Mim and Nat and their dad again as well as travelling to a completely different country as this series (this is #4) goes from strength to strength.  Even though I’ve never quite seen the point of dog shows and the like – they’re all beautiful just as they are to me- this one still kept me reading to the end.