Sparky & Spike: CHARLES SCHULZ and the Wildest, Smartest Dog Ever is just the right amount of biography for young beginning readers, not too much, just enough.

From his early school days, Charles, AKA Sparky, wanted to be a cartoonist. His teachers and fellow students all enjoyed his drawings. Every Saturday at 9 PM it never failed, Spike would remind Sparky’s father to go down to the store and pick up the Sunday comics. Then they would read them together.

Sparky would eventually send a drawing of Spike to the comic- Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with the caption, “A HUNTING DOG THAT EATS PINS, TACKS, SCREWS, AND RAZOR BLADES IS OWNED BY C. F. SCHULZ, ST. Paul, Minn.” After waiting for two long grueling months, Sparky saw his drawing printed in the Sunday paper.

And the rest is history, Charles Schulz would eventually become the multiple award winning cartoonist of the comic – Peanuts.

What is, also, rewarding to see is a photo of the letter Charles M. Schulz sent to Daniel Andreasen on July 7, 1975, giving advice to a young want to be illustrator. That young boy, in fact, grew up to be an illustrator, the illustrator of this very book.