A Piglet Called Truffle

Helen Peters's A Piglet Called Truffle is a warm farm story for 7 year olds about a girl who can't bear to leave a tiny piglet to die.

What happens

Jasmine lives on Oak Tree Farm. Her mum's the vet and her dad runs the farm, so animals are part of every single day. What Jasmine really wants, though, is a pig. She even reads a magazine called Practical Pigs.

One November afternoon she goes with Mum to a calving at grumpy Mr Carter's farm. His sow has just had eleven piglets. Except Jasmine finds a twelfth, squashed under the others. It's barely bigger than her hand and too weak to feed.

Mr Carter says it'll never survive and should be put out of its misery. Jasmine is having none of it.

So she smuggles the piglet home inside her coat. She calls her Truffle (a name that works for a boy too, just in case).

What follows is a very tense evening. Jasmine hides Truffle in a box between her bed and the radiator. She pretends to feel sick to get out of dinner. She sneaks to the farm's medicine cupboard and feeds Truffle drop by drop with a syringe. Then she tucks her into the gentlest oven of the Aga for the night, the way her dad warms up weak lambs, and sets her alarm for every hour.

Will Truffle make it? Your reader will be willing her on the whole way.

It's full of real farm know-how, explained simply as Jasmine goes. Why a newborn animal needs its mother's first milk. How to test the temperature on your wrist. Why you scrub your wellies between farms.

And her little brother Manu and his best friend Ben are brilliant comic relief. They're busy making "dying crumble" in the bushes and playing a game called Violent Babies at school (it got them sent to the Head).

It's honest that farm animals don't always survive. The family's old dog died of old age last month, and Jasmine still thinks about a lamb called Harry who didn't make it. It's told gently, but a very tender-hearted reader might need a cuddle.

If you've got a reader who brings home every stray and injured creature they find, they'll recognise themselves in Jasmine straight away.

What to read next

This is the first book about Jasmine and her animals. For another child who falls head over heels for a pig on a farm, try Jemima the Pig and the 127 Acorns by Michael Morpurgo.