Inspired by musical dreams, Billy heads for Nashville. Promising at the outset that this is just the first of a series of adventures starring her beloved “god-dog,” Parton goes on to hit all the conventional thematic notes. In this picture book from singer Parton and co-author Perl, a small French bulldog goes to Nashville, joins a band, fends off bullies, and meets one of the queens of country music. Off hustles the snail, to spur a nearby community to action with another slimy message: “ SAVE THE WHALE.” Donaldson’s rhyme, though not cumulative, sounds like “The house that Jack built”-“This is the tide coming into the bay, / And these are the villagers shouting, ‘HOORAY!’ / As the whale and the snail travel safely away.” Looking in turn hopeful, delighted, anxious, awed, and determined, Scheffler’s snail, though tiny next to her gargantuan companion, steals the show in each picturesque seascape-and upon returning home, provides so enticing an account of her adventures that her fellow mollusks all climb on board the whale’s tail for a repeat voyage. Responding to a plaintive “ Ride wanted around the world,” scrawled in slime on a coastal rock, whale picks up snail, then sails off to visit waters tropical and polar, stormy and serene before inadvertently beaching himself. Like an ocean-going “Lion and the Mouse,” a humpback whale and a snail “with an itchy foot” help each other out in this cheery travelogue.
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