Stick Dog Slurps Spaghetti

Tom Watson's Stick Dog Slurps Spaghetti is a giggly food-hunt story for 7 year olds about five stray dogs who go looking for a rope and find dinner instead.

What happens

It's the sixth Stick Dog book. The five friends are huddled in Stick Dog's pipe, and nobody has eaten properly since yesterday morning. (Cheez Doodles don't count. They're mostly air, apparently.)

Then Mutt owns up. He ate something the others didn't. It was a rope, and he's very sorry, because he'd meant to bring it back for tug-of-war.

So they head to the bins behind the hardware store for another. Karen squeezes under a skip and nudges out a takeaway box. Inside are some very skinny, very floppy ropes covered in red stuff.

Your reader will know what they are long before the dogs do! Karen slurps one, chews, and announces that ropes taste GREAT.

The lid says Tip-Top Spaghetti, above a picture of a hill. There's only one really big hill near Picasso Park, and none of them has ever been up it.

Getting up it is the funniest stretch. Poo-Poo wants to lasso a passing aeroplane by its propeller. Stripes has a teamwork plan that needs fifteen trips up the hill instead of five (maths is her worst subject, she admits). Mutt waits for a striped hot-air balloon, and Karen spots one. It's the moon.

Stick Dog never says no. He just suggests they hear each plan somewhere comfier, a little further up. Can you see where this is going? The others can't, and when they reach the top they're sure HE'S the one who didn't notice.

The narrator butts in all the way through. He explains how to hold a Slurp-Off with a friend (his mum still won't let him boil the pasta himself). If your reader likes a book that chats back, he's great company.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Poo-Poo's plan for the restaurant's back door is to bite whoever opens it on the knee, and he keeps bargaining down to a chomp, a gnaw, a nibble. Stick Dog tells him firmly that it isn't nice. Karen's route up the hill involves sitting in a red-hot frying pan. It's all played for laughs, but not every idea is one to copy.

What to read next

This is the same chatty narrator who started the series by admitting he can't draw, which is how Stick Dog got his name. If your reader hasn't met him yet, the very first Stick Dog book is where he makes that deal with you, and where five hungry dogs catch the smell of a barbecue at Picasso Park.