King and Kayla Series by Dori Hillestad Butler

This early reader series is written from a dog, King’s, point of view. His “human” is Kayla and together they solve mysteries around their neighborhood. These titles have many illustrations, are five chapters each, and usually have just under 50 pages. You can read these titles in any order.

Reading Level: Ages 6-8
Read Aloud: All Ages

This early reader series has sweet characters, cute illustrations, and fun mysteries for your new reader. My son thoroughly enjoyed this series, especially the parts where King gets into some humorous doggy trouble. Kids can try to solve the mystery before King and Kayla, which proved to be a lot of fun. Our favorite book was Secret Code. Below is a list of the titles read for this review. All the titles begin King & Kayla and the Case of the…

Cat Hunt
Downstairs Ghost
Escape Artist
Found Fred
Gold Ring
Lost Library Book
Lost Tooth
Missing Dog Treats
Mysterious Mouse
Secret Code
Unhappy Neighbor

For new readers, do be aware that King sometimes makes up numbers that children may have difficult decoding like “eleventy.”

Things to Note:
In Unhappy Neighbor and Gold Ring, there is a little bit of talk about animal poop.
Downstairs Ghost has Kayla proving to her friend that the noises and sights she thought are a ghost are in fact, not.
Lost Tooth talks about the tooth fairy as if it were real.
In Lost Library Book, the book they are searching for is titled, “Ribbit, Says Rabbit.” Kayla says, “It’s the one about the frog who wants to be a rabbit.” This is the only statement made about the book, so we don’t know exactly what angle the author intended, but it’s definitely worth noting.
In Escape Artist, some might argue that a character, KC, doesn’t have a defined male or female appearance. KC is a child and to me looks like a girl with short hair and a pink streak.

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclaimer for more info.