Guinea Pigs Online 2 – Furry Towers

Jennifer Gray and Amanda Swift's Furry Towers is a funny animal adventure for 8 year olds about two pampered guinea pigs who book themselves into a five-star hotel.

What happens

Coco is worried. Guinea pigs keep going missing all over Strawberry Park (fifty-five of them, according to the local paper). And Ben and Henrietta, who own Coco and Fuzzy, are off to rescue seals for a week.

So Fuzzy does some late-night surfing on Ben's laptop and finds Furry Towers. It's a hotel just for guinea pigs, with a gym, a spa and a blueberry-and-vanilla facial. Who could say no to that?

They leave the page open for the humans to find. It works a treat.

Then they arrive. The owner, Nigel, takes one look at them, kicks Henrietta's list of instructions under a pile of leaves and tips them into a hutch that smells like a toilet. (Coco suggests a new perfume called Eau de Wee-Wee.) Only the special guinea pigs get to go inside the house. Why?

Their hutch-mate is Private Pat. She wears a tin helmet, lives in a toy tank and barks orders at everyone. She's also been digging an escape tunnel with a tiny screwdriver, and she gets rid of the earth by rolling it into pellets that Nigel thinks are poo!

It's VERY silly and super quick. Coco is posh and vain and calls herself "one" because she used to live with the Queen. She also says some properly mean things about her friend Eduardo's songs, and then feels awful about it. Fuzzy is the kind one, and mostly he thinks about avocados.

If your reader loves a toilet joke there are plenty here. But it's also a sweet little story about falling out with a friend and wishing you hadn't.

There's one tense moment when Renard the fox corners Coco at the end of the tunnel and licks his lips. It's over quickly, and it's as funny as it is scary.

What to read next

If they want more from the same gang, Viking Victory is in the library too. This time a builder with a digger wants to flatten the thicket where Eduardo lives, so the guinea pigs start an online protest.