Adventures in Fosterland 1 – Emmett and Jez

Hannah Shaw's Emmett and Jez is a sweet, funny animal story for 5 year olds about a piglet who decides he's a kitten.

What happens

Emmett is tiny. One minute he's squashed into a truck with his mama and his brothers and sisters. The next, he's tumbling onto the road and rolling into a ditch. All on his own.

A kind woman (Emmett is sure she's a giant) scoops him up and drives him home. There he meets Jez, a grand three-legged kitten who welcomes him to Fosterland. It's a place where the lost are found and the hungry are fed.

Jez tells Emmett he must be a foster kitten, just like him. Nobody has ever told Emmett what he is, so he believes it! (His tail is short and pink and not at all fluffy, but he decides not to mention that.)

Seeing the house through their eyes is the funniest part. The sofa is Mount Couch. The heater is the sun box. The shower is the rain forest, where hot rain falls once a day and it smells of flowers afterwards. The kind woman is the food fairy, who has one very strange habit. She keeps taking Jez's poo away.

Who doesn't love a piglet belly-flopping into a bowl of warm milk?

Under the giggles, it's a lovely story about friendship and fitting in. Emmett tries SO hard to be a cat. Climbing Mount Couch terrifies him. He loves kale, and Jez is horrified. But Jez is the one who tells him it's okay to look a little different.

There's a gentle ache running through it too. The foster babies are all waiting for a forever home, and Emmett and Jez are both growing. A child who feels a bit different from everyone else, or who's ever worried about being parted from a friend, will find a lot to hold on to here.

What to read next

If your reader falls for Fosterland, Super Spinach is about a very small tabby kitten stuck in her own cage at a shelter, watching the others play and wishing she had a sidekick.