Lily to the Rescue: Dog Dog Goose

W. Bruce Cameron's Lily to the Rescue: Dog Dog Goose is an animal story for 7 year olds told by a dog who ends up being mistaken for a mother goose.

What happens

Lily belongs to Maggie Rose, whose mum runs an animal shelter. Lily calls the shelter Work, and she goes most days to play with whatever has come in.

She's out for an ice cream when a neighbour points at a wooden planter in a car park. A goose laid her eggs in it, some men turned up to fix potholes, and the noise frightened her off. She never came back.

The eggs have hatched anyway. A huddle of fluffy things with beaks, sitting in broken shell, peeping. And there's a fox in the trees who has definitely noticed.

So Maggie Rose lifts Lily into the planter to keep them safe, which is a kind idea and completely the wrong one. Geese imprint. The first thing they see, they decide is their mother.

They decide Lily is their mother.

From there it's a lovely problem. The goslings follow Lily everywhere. They nibble her whiskers. They wedge themselves under her belly the second she lies down. She can't play Chase-Me with the birds underfoot, and she can't go home at night because they'll panic without her.

And at some point somebody is going to have to teach these geese to fly, and the only mother they have is a dog.

Being inside Lily's head is the whole pleasure of it. She explains a lot of things confidently and gets most of them slightly wrong. She thinks laughing is how people wag, since they haven't got tails. She notes that phones do not smell at all interesting. She is extremely good at Sit and would like you to know it.

There's a second story running underneath. Maggie Rose's brother Bryan has been slipping off after dinner to visit Brewster, an old dog at the shelter that nobody wants, and telling his parents he's playing baseball. The two of them start doing extra chores to scrape together an adoption fee.

Nothing here is upsetting. The mother goose leaves before the story starts and the book is straight with your reader about why she isn't coming back. There's talk of what happens to geese who don't migrate, coyotes included, but it's the sort of plain fact a child who loves animals will want to know.

What to read next

Lily's first outing is in the library too. If they want to see how she got her job, the first Lily to the Rescue book has her meeting a crow with a broken wing.