Lily to the Rescue: Two Little Piggies

W. Bruce Cameron's Lily to the Rescue: Two Little Piggies is a warm, funny animal story for 7 year olds about two runaway piglets and the dog who'd quite like their milk.

What happens

Lily is Maggie Rose's dog, and she tells the story herself. She's a rescue dog in both senses. She was rescued, and now she helps Maggie Rose's mum look after the animals at the shelter (Lily calls it Work).

One day the phone rings. Two baby pigs have trotted into a truck stop by a busy highway. Nobody knows where they've come from. There are no pig farms nearby, and on the security camera they just seem to appear out of nowhere.

Catching them is chaos. Racks of sweatshirts go over. A shelf of hats collapses. In the end it's Lily who sorts it out, by getting the piglets to play Chase-Me straight into Mum's arms.

Then comes the hard part. The piglets need a bottle every two hours, day and night. Dad gets the night shift, which Mum finds very funny. Maggie Rose helps so much that she falls asleep in class and slides off her chair!

Lily's voice is the joy of this one. She's always sure she's being a good dog. She can't understand why the pigs get milk and she doesn't (it's a running injustice). And she notices things with her nose that the humans haven't worked out yet.

That's the gentle bit of mystery. Lily smells something on the piglets right at the start. Could your reader put it together before the grown-ups do?

There's lots of real animal know-how tucked in too. Dad's a game warden, and a visit to a ranch shows Maggie Rose why a fawn lying alone in the grass usually isn't abandoned at all.

There's nothing upsetting here. The worst of it is a grumpy old dog called Brewster being jumped on by piglets, again and again. It's a sweet, silly read for a child who loves animals, and it reads aloud beautifully.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Lily's back in The Not-So-Stinky Skunk. That time it's a camping trip with Dad, a prairie dog rescue and Lily's very first skunk.