A Lamb Called Lucky

Helen Peters's A Lamb Called Lucky is a farm story for 8 year olds about lambing season and two baby birds found in the straw.

What happens

Jasmine lives at Oak Tree Farm. Her dad farms it and her mum is the vet, which means animals turn up in this house at all hours and nobody thinks it's odd.

She already has a pig called Truffle, who was a runt when she found her, a collie she's training to work sheep, and a duck who lives with the chickens.

She and her best friend Tom are going to run an animal rescue centre when they're older. They're getting plenty of practice.

It's the Easter holidays and the lambing barn is full. Jasmine's favourite place in the world, she reckons, and you believe her, because the book knows exactly what it sounds like in there. A hundred ewes calling and a hundred lambs calling back, and every single one of them picking out their own.

Then she spots something yellow in the straw. It's the edge of a beak. Two newly hatched birds, no feathers at all, pink and scaly and honestly rather ugly. Like baby dinosaurs, Tom says.

They can't find the nest and they can't reach the beams anyway. So they look it up online, which tells them the birds probably won't make it and that they should hand them to an expert.

Jasmine hides them in her wardrobe instead.

The how of it is all there, which is the good bit. Cat food mashed with water, pieces the size of half your little fingernail, dropped in with tweezers, every half an hour, all day.

And there's a rule that costs her something. If she talks to them or strokes them, they'll think she's their mother and they'll never be able to live wild. So she has to look after them without being loved by them. She decides to do it anyway because it's the right thing to do, and you can tell it's hard.

Her little brother Manu is the comedy. He comes home from school cookery with one biscuit in a box and a completely straight face.

Farm life being farm life, there are losses in here. Lambs sometimes die for no reason at all and the book says so plainly rather than hiding it. There's a motherless lamb coming, there's danger in the night ahead, and a duck Jasmine rescued last year only needed rescuing because a dog killed its mother.

For a child who already knows how a farm works, none of that will land hard. For one who takes animal sadness to heart, go in knowing it's there.

What to read next

A Piglet Called Truffle is where all this began, with a runt nobody expected to keep.