Awards can be deceiving.

That’s a cliché, but it’s one we should all tattoo on our foreheads—for ourselves, for others, for the gods in between. They are buoyed by political whims and aesthetic fads, and we know this. We know this. But still, every year, everything that glitters is gold.

Any time a children’s book comes across my desk, which is often, I try very, very hard to read it without worrying about which awards it received, who reviewed it, or who published it. It’s darn near impossible, and the unconscious bias of these stamps of approval steals my mind, again and again, away from my heart.

And so I was especially fortunate to recently read a copy of Doug Salati’s Hot Dog (Knopf, 2022) without having any idea that it had won any awards at all. When I plucked the book from the shelves of the Boca Raton Public Library, it was nothing more than an anonymous block of paper, wobbling somewhere in the Leaning Tower of Pisa I held in my arms:

What a perfect experience it is to fall in love with a book without being told that you really ought to fall in love with the book.

To lose your heart to a picture book, without prejudice, is to slip away to that long-departed essence of childhood. That was the time, so quiet, so still, when we were not servants to the algorithmic stars of Amazon, or to the armchair nods of NPR, or to the brazen tricks of medals and seals. You fell in love because you fell in love.

I fell in love on Saturday with Doug Salati’s Hot Dog. It is a book with only a few words—if I were to count them, I think I’d find less than 100. Instead, it tells its story - and it is very much a story - through illustrations that beam with feeling. A restless dachshund swelters under the heat of New York City and begs his owner—an older, red-headed woman—to take him out of the city.

She relents, taking him on the train to a New England island. (Salati has created artwork for the Nantucket Atheneum Dance Festival, so of course I have my fingers crossed that Nantucket is the nameless island.) The dog’s joy is infectious, and as he splashes and sniffs along the seashore, you cannot help but swell with delight. You want to reach into the pages and fling the nearest wand of driftwood across the sparkle and spray.

The story felt all the more refreshing in the summer of 2023 when all of us have been feeling like sweltering dachshunds ourselves.

The irony of all of this is that by the time I got finished with this book, I said repeatedly, “Man! Somebody should give that book the Caldecott!”

Well.

See more of Doug Salati’s work at his website and Instagram.