Review by Frank Plowright

Jenny Newhouse has been entrusted with buying new uniforms for the school dance team, except when the time comes to pay her brother for ordering them online the bag with the money raised has disappeared. How’s she going to get it back? Well, babysitting seems the answer, and here Jenny has an advantage most people don’t: she can speak baby, which means that when Rosie Woodson starts acting up Jenny has no problem keeping her in line. Rosie’s a smart cookie and has her own detective business. Perhaps she can help Jenny.

Meg Cabot’s brand of fiction aimed at young girls needs no endorsement from this site, nor indeed any other, having sold massive amounts of books, with The Princess Diaries series the most prominent and successful. Her only previous step into comics featured a younger version of superhero Black Canary in Ignite, but Detective Baby is a very different project, and one better suited to her skill set. It’s a clever idea for a start, with well conceived characters, Rosie swithering between a baby having temper tantrums and a hard-nosed detective, and Jenny having enough sense to work with her when needs must. If anything, concept and execution resemble a wacky 1960s US sitcom.

Without sympathetic art, though, everything would fall flat, and Amelia Allore is much more than just a sympathetic artist. She brings life, energy and personality to the cast, and has a great sense of page design, emphasising what’s necessary and yet still ensuring there’s a solid eye-catching look. The muted pastel colours add a final polish.

Will Rosie really be able to figure out where Jenny’s missing money is? Well the technique of settling on a suspect before figuring out the methods is hardly textbook, but common sense prevails, and Cabot keeps the tensions high as Jenny and Rosie investigate. Some of the financial details beloved of Jenny’s brother might fly over readers’ heads, but they’ll pick up the gist.

Dance Team Drama is a cheerful, good-natured tale, and readers will be pleased to know there’s more to come in Cheerleader Challenge.