VETERAN children's author Colin McNaughton has invented a cow family, the Butterfields. This book tells how daughter Cushie paints her face in all manner of bright colours to feign illness and stay off school.

The pictures are as cheerily brash as that storyline suggests, and Jack particularly liked the discovery of Cushie's paint palette with colours such as "sick as a parrot blue" and "collywobbles purple".

My only concern is the age of the readership the book is targeting.

The bold pictures and simple text will suit tots, but they won't understand Cushie's deviousness. This book falls between two milking stools.

Updated: 09:18 Wednesday, August 04, 2004