I love everything Isabel Allende creates. Perla is such a fantastic character with potential for a whole range of adventures with her best friend Nico Rico. In true Allende fashion, Perla is not a prim and polished dog; she is a bit scruffy and she's small, but she's a true hero, defying all expectations.

This is a perfectly paced story with some early learning goals around approaching strangers, avoiding prejudgements, and not wandering off alone.

We will certainly be buying copies for our library and using it in project collections for EYFS and KS1.

Perla the dog claims to have superpowers – and may end up having to prove it when the boy from her family of humans goes walkabout after school one day. The dog might be able to shout and be recognised, and make everyone love her – but what part does the pirate play? That's mostly the point of the piece here, alongside not walking out of school by yourself – what people think of the Pirate before he helps in the lad's recovery and what they think afterwards. But it still doesn't make for a brilliant read; to me it felt almost clumsy. A lot of the early pages seemed to be a summary of the previous book in the series – they're not, but they felt in that style for some reason. All in all I don't think narrating her adventures is really one of Perla's superpowers.