This early reader series features dog siblings Digger and Daisy. In Picnic, Daisy stops to look at things, while Digger likes to smell them. Daisy tells him the name of different objects that catch his attention: flowers, a lemon tree, pie on the neighbor’s windowsill, and hot dogs on a grill. When Digger explores a golf hole, his nose is filled with dirt, and he cannot smell any of their picnic food, but his nose recovers as they approach home and encounter a skunk. In Zoo, Digger tries to copy the animals. He falls over when he tries to stand on one leg like the flamingo, attempts to climb a tree like the monkeys, wants to eat leaves from a tree like the giraffes, and learns to swim in a pond like the ducks. The books feature large a font, with lines that are short and easy to scan, and the bold, cartoon illustrations cheerfully reinforce the text with ample picture clues. Young readers will enjoy sharing these excursions.

In Digger and Daisy’s second outing, Digger learns that—all appearances to the contrary—sometimes it is best to have a nose full of dirt.
Digger and Daisy, the two chummy canine siblings—as canine siblings, unlike certain other species, are wont to be—decide to go for a picnic. While Daisy is happy to take in nature with her eyes, her younger brother likes to exercise his nose. The words in this early reader have a nice levitating quality, even in the unlikeliest of places—“Digger likes to smell everything. He puts his nose in the hole. Digger sniffs. He sniffs dirt up his nose. Digger snuffs. He snuffs more dirt up his nose”—which make them fun to engage with. After Digger has gotten a good whiff of the flowers and the cooling pie and the franks on the grill, all of which raise a note of concern from Daisy for one reason or another, and after Digger gets his nose clogged for being, as it were, too nosy, the story reverses gears. It retraces its steps but now with the world of scent closed to Digger’s jam-packed nostrils. It’s almost Shakespearean, until the skunk arrives on the scene, its dashing black-and-white look a fine counterpart to the waxy crayon sheen of the rest of Sullivan’s artwork.
Even the best of brothers can cause a stink from time to time, but rarely are they so sweet.