Lost! The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog

Lost! is a Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog story for 8 year olds by Jeremy Strong, narrated by Streaker the dog herself, who is quite certain she is handling everything beautifully.

What happens

Streaker gets shut in the back of a pie van. She had got in to guard the pies. The safest place for a pie, she reasons, is inside a bank, and she hasn't got a piggy bank. She is a doggy bank.

By the time the van stops she has eaten the lot, been sick down the driver's trousers and bolted off into the dark. She has no idea where she is or which way home might be.

The joke that carries the whole book is the gap between what Streaker tells you and what actually happened. She calls people two-legs. She pities them for their silly little ears. She decides the man in sunglasses is a pie robber, then is genuinely offended when he drives off with the entire van instead of just taking the pies like a professional.

Left alone in the dark, she tries to work things out by asking herself questions. That falls apart within about six questions and she carries on regardless.

The homesick bit is done nicely and never sags. Under a damp cardboard box she thinks about her pups, and about Trevor, who snores like a road drill and once needed her help with a homework question about triangles. They both gave the same answer. Neither of them thinks much of triangles.

Fair warning about the humour, because it is very much that sort of book. Streaker is sick in the van. She piddles on a security guard's boots through a fence. Two guard dogs swear at her so furiously that the book prints their language as a row of symbols.

None of it is mean and none of it is frightening, and most eight year olds will find all three of those things wonderful. If yours doesn't, this is not the book to change their mind.

If you've got a reader who enjoys a narrator who is clearly getting it wrong, Streaker is a great one. You can see the real story happening just behind hers, and she never notices.

What to read next

She is well established by this book and has pups of her own here. If your reader would rather begin where it began, The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog is told by Trevor instead, back when his Easter holidays hung on somehow getting that dog to do as she was told.