Christmas Chaos for the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog

Christmas Chaos for the Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog by Jeremy Strong is a funny family story for 8 year olds about a boy trying to hang on to three puppies he has already been told he can't keep.

What happens

Trevor reckons his dog Streaker is the best dog in the world. Nobody else in the house agrees. She will come when he calls, although possibly not until the day after tomorrow.

Streaker has three puppies. Trevor wanted to call them Piddle, Tiddle and Widdle. Mum said absolutely not, so they ended up as One, Two and Three, which Trevor considers the most boring names ever given to a dog.

They are all being sold before Christmas. Dad has already stuck a card up in the shop.

Trevor's plan is simple enough. Put the buyers off.

His main weapon is Erik, the family cat, who came home with Streaker one day and got named after a Viking on the grounds that he is fierce and hairy. Erik specialises in launching himself at visitors' backsides.

So when a man with a moustache like a yak dangling off his nose turns up cooing over the pups, Trevor helpfully mentions that Erik has been teaching them to do exactly that, and that their teeth are all through now.

That's the pleasure of this one. Trevor tells you the lot himself, in lists, in capitals, with brackets full of the things he thinks but doesn't say out loud. He will stop a scene dead to explain why golf is the most pointless activity ever invented.

He is also at the age where everything is mortifying. His friend Tina keeps taking his arm and telling him he should be more tactile. He flinches. Then Charlie Smugg turns up, fourteen and enormous, with three Alsatians and a lot of loud remarks about mistletoe.

Has your reader ever had a perfectly ordinary friendship go strange because somebody else started commenting on it? That bit will ring very true.

A word about those puppies before you start. They are being sold and Trevor spends the book resisting it, so a reader who gets properly attached to animals may find that thread more anxious than funny. A reader who mainly enjoys watching a boy scheme against his own parents will be fine, because the cheek never lets up.

It's also not the first Streaker book, and the opening assumes you already know the dog and the cat.

What to read next

If your reader likes a narrator keeping a running tally of everybody else's nonsense, Wild Thing Gets a Dog is a different family with much the same problem. Kate's little sister Josephine has a whole catalogue of defences beginning "Nobody said I couldn't", including the day she paddled Dad's guitar case down the stairs.