Gravity Falls: Once Upon a Swine

Once Upon a Swine from Disney Books is a Gravity Falls story for 8 year olds about a boy who gets hold of a time machine and uses it to impress a girl.

What happens

Grunkle Stan has rented the cheapest fair money can rent and set it up in a forest clearing. He hands the twins a stack of fake safety certificates and tells them to slap one on anything that looks like a lawsuit.

Dipper has one goal for the day. A perfect afternoon at the fair with Wendy, who works at the Mystery Shack. Mabel's goal is the same as always, which is to have fun.

Mabel finds a booth where you can win a pig by guessing its weight, locks eyes with one of them and hears it say her name. Possibly it said doorbell. She isn't having that.

Meanwhile Dipper is losing his nerve, Robbie turns up in new tight jeans looking for Wendy, and a man in a grey suit is hiding behind the portable toilets talking into his wristwatch.

Then Dipper works out how to go back and do the moment again. What he doesn't work out, until later, is what going back does to his sister's day.

If your child already watches the programme, this is the best part of the book. The voices are exactly right. Stan is still running a scam, Soos is still Soos, and the jokes keep coming.

If they don't watch it, the book will not stop and explain. It assumes you already know why a pig that seems to say your name, a child with psychic powers and a handyman in a welding mask are all normal here.

The pig is worth it on his own. Mabel's devotion is total and immediate, and "Oink-el!" is a very hard noise not to read aloud.

A word about the age on this one. Dipper is twelve and Wendy is fifteen, and the engine of the whole plot is a crush and a rival with a guitar. Stan cheerfully forges safety paperwork and announces that when there are no police around, anything is legal, which is played entirely for laughs.

Nothing in the opening is frightening or unkind. A child at the younger end of that will get much more out of it if you read it together and do the voices.

What to read next

If the bit they love is the time-travel muddle, The Day I Found a Wormhole at the Bottom of the Garden is in the library. Billy digs one up in his own back garden, people from history start climbing out of it, and he has to get them all back before he changes everything.