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Steven Butler and James Patterson's Happy Howlidays is a very silly Christmas diary for 7 year olds, written by a dog who gets every single holiday tradition wrong.
Junior is a rescue dog, and this is his first winter outside the dog shelter (he calls it POOCH PRISON). An old dog in there used to tell stories about the Howliday Season. Now it's actually happening!
The trouble is, Junior only understands about half of what humans say. So Thanksgiving becomes Fangsgiving, a special day when everyone gets given new teeth. Christmas is Critter-Mess Day. And Santa is Saint Lick, who apparently lives up a pole somewhere.
Is there anything funnier than a dog explaining your own traditions back to you? Every page has another brilliant mix-up. Pumpkins are exploding vegetables. The first snowfall means the whole world has gone missing overnight.
It's Junior's own diary and he talks straight to your reader the whole way through. He calls them his "furless friend" and gets so excited he can hardly get his words out. It's LOUD, with lots of capitals, and very easy to get swept along with.
He wants to be a GOOD BOY more than anything in the world. But his plans have a way of going wrong, and one of them ruins the Fangsgiving turkey in a very smelly way.
Then a friend's owner calls dog poo "presents" and Junior puts two and two together about Saint Lick (you can imagine how that goes). By Christmas Eve he's turning the house into one big trap.
It's set in America, so the holidays start with Thanksgiving, and the humans of his pals at the dog park celebrate Hanukkah and Kwanzaa too. Junior gets all of those gloriously muddled up as well.
This is Junior's second diary (he tells you so himself), but he catches your reader up on what they missed straight away.
If you've got a reader who loves a cheeky animal narrator and plenty of toilet humour, this will have them giggling. And if they're keen for more of Junior, Mission Impawsible is his next diary and he's every bit as excitable in that one.
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