Full disclosure: I am a dog person. My daughter, also a dog person, and a pediatrician, reports that the service dogs who visit her hospital are often the only remedy for her sick patients. I believe in dog joy. But the medal-worthiness of Jump for Joy, illustrated by Hadley Hooper and written by Karen Gray Ruelle, does not depend on your shared canine affection. This book deserves attention for its innovative artistic technique, its masterful visual storytelling, and its recognition and respect for its child audience.

Karen Gray Ruelle renews an admittedly age-old child-meets-dog story with sparse text, skillful word play, and clever repetition. Hadley Hooper honors Ruelle’s verbal narrative, and her close-looking viewers, with illustrations that likewise infuse new life into old material. She creates her characters, Joy, a human girl, and Jump, a male dog, in golden sepia tones with brush and ink, while “their black and white world is made from found textures and images from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, collaged together to create something new.” Hooper’s restrained color palette throughout most of the book, together with her repurposed materials, evokes the familiar childhood act of collaging found objects and creates an aesthetic that is at once classic and contemporary.

Hooper expands the text’s message that joy is a process, and importantly, she not only immerses viewers in the (spoiler alert) inevitable happy ending, but also in the longing and seeking, in the creating and persisting. When Ruelle writes, “A big dog. A little dog. A spotted dog. A curly dog. It didn’t matter. She’d know her dog when she saw him,” Hooper uses vintage papers in a double-page spread illustration brimming with dogs and with emotion. She gives each dog a differently patterned, textured coat. Some dogs direct hopeful gazes at Joy, some plead with the viewer, others sleep and play. As Joy considers the dogs, viewers, too, ponder their preferences. The Scottish terrier with plaid fur? The doodle with a ball in its mouth? The sleeping dog with hints of floral curls? Two big dogs with sad eyes staring at the viewer? Or maybe the spotted dog running toward the next page?

Throughout the seasons, Joy and Jump each attempt to create a dog or a kid, respectively, from tulips and ferns, seashells and sand, sticks and mud, and finally, from snow — all composed of antique papers. Hooper emphasizes both characters’ cheerful persistence despite setbacks. She paints Joy and Jump with determined smiles and energetic postures. Joy sports springy pigtails and lively polka dots. Jump covets a red ball, the only notable burst of color, charged with bouncy potential. As anyone with a ball-chasing dog knows, a dog will eventually find a human to toss it. As Joy and Jump seek a friend, they engage in familiar acts of childhood play, and at the same time, they parallel Hooper’s creative process, becoming her characters and her collaborators.

The book jacket builds anticipation for the characters’ inevitable union by maximizing the illusions of proximity and distance that the book affords. On the front cover, Joy puts the finishing touches on the o in her name, crafted from botanical papers, as are all the title’s eye-catching letters. Golden paw prints trail from the book’s front flap, across the front cover, and end at the top of the back cover, where Jump holds a floral branch that crosses the spine and forms the J in his name. While the closed jacket separates Joy from Jump, the fully opened jacket reveals the pair within inches of each other.

Throughout the book, Hooper further manipulates the characters’ relationship through her strategic use of the book’s gutter. In the scenes mentioned above, Joy occupies the verso and Jump the recto. In the spring scene, they remain firmly planted on their assigned sides. In the summer, a blue wave — a rare splash of color — washes away Joy’s shell dog on the verso and Jump’s sand child on the recto. A fall windstorm narrows the narrative distance between Joy and Jump, even as they remain on facing pages. The windstorm crosses the gutter and destroys Joy’s stick dog and Jump’s mud kid, but it leaves a promising tangle of sticks and mud. In the winter, saddened by their melted snow companions, Jump and Joy each see their strikingly similar reflections in duplicate snow puddles; Hooper has painted their distinct figures alike enough to render this illusion believable. On the following full-bleed double-page spread, Hooper depicts a fleeting moment of despair with an ominous black and gray landscape. A tree lines the gutter and exaggerates the separation between Joy, head down, facing the verso, and Jump, on the recto, facing the page turn. But a faint flock of golden birds, amidst a bright patch of white clouds, encourages the viewer to seek Joy, to follow Jump’s gaze toward the page turn. When the two finally meet, Hooper rewards them, and viewers, with an explosion of color–the collaged papers are now tinted and mixed with colorful brush stroke flowers, and Joy and Jump, with the red ball between them, jump for joy.  

On the cover, and throughout, Hooper enlists Joy and Jump, and by extension viewers, in the process of constructing joy.  

There’s more to say about the merits of this book, but I’ll leave you with this thought: 

As the word joy pops up increasingly in current headlines, will 2025 be the year of Jump for Joy? Will you vote for joy?

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Jump for Joy]