What fun this book is! Author and illustrator Scot Ritchie has created a lively adventure featuring five friends – Yulee, Pedro, Nick, Sally and Martin – who go on a round-the-world hunt for Sally’s missing dog, Max, and cat, Ollie.

The framing sequence doesn't work either - our dog and cat ran away! we need maps! what? - and then in the end the book goes completely off the rails with the page of a 'map' of the solar system that is just a bunch of circles in a line and then a text disclaimer that no, the planets are never actually in that position relative to each other and this is just imaginary. How is a child supposed to understand symbols and legends when a cartoonish picture of a tree is plopped down on top of a bunch of identically cartoonish pictures of trees? How is a child supposed to understand scale when the line says a centimeter represents a mile but the 'map' includes little pictures of buildings and also little pictures of kids, both approximately a centimeter high? I think it would have been much better to include illustrations of places and then separate illustrations of maps of those places. Putting the characters into the 'maps' by making the illustrations somewhat map-like probably sounded like a clever idea, but it is just incredibly confusing and not at all effective in what is supposed to be a 'First Book' of mapping skills.

The main problem is not until the very last page is there any actual map in the book.

Follow that map by scot ritchie