Stick Dog Crashes a Party

Stick Dog Crashes a Party by Tom Watson is a very silly food-hunting story for 7 year olds about five strays and a wedding buffet.

What happens

It opens with a ketchup sachet. Mutt shakes his fur, out drops a squishy red-and-white packet, and Poo-Poo presses it far too hard.

Red goes everywhere. Mostly over Karen's nose.

Stripes decides Karen is bleeding to death and starts shouting for medical supplies. A defibrillator. An X-ray machine. A chain saw, in case the nose has to come off and be glued back on (Mutt shakes himself hopefully, because he's fairly sure he has some glue in there).

Stick Dog, who is the only one of them with any sense, points out that blood tends to come with being hurt. Then he suggests Karen has a sniff.

It's pizza sauce. Which means there is pizza somewhere, which is how all five of them end up outside the Pizza Palace at closing time, and how they overhear a man called Goose mention a wedding buffet at Picasso Park the following night.

Getting to that buffet is the book. The plans are the joke.

Poo-Poo works out that everyone at the party is there for a wedding, so all the dogs have to do is marry each other. Karen wants to hammer the guests' shoes to the floor, and cheerfully adjusts her plan every time an objection turns up. Mutt's plan needs a rocket ship, which they do not have.

Stick Dog talks them out of each one so kindly that none of them notices.

The thing to expect is the narrator. He stops the story whenever he feels like it, invents a woman called Mildred to demonstrate nose-licking etiquette, and tells you what's about to happen before it happens. Plenty of children find that hilarious. Some just want the story to get on with it.

It's American in its details, so there are Frisbees and a buffet and an enormous amount of drooling, but nothing your reader will trip over.

You don't need the earlier books, though a cat the dogs met once before turns up again and Stripes is beside herself about it.

What to read next

If they take to Stick Dog's patience with his hopeless friends, Stick Dog Gets the Tacos does more of exactly this. Karen sprints in announcing an emergency that turns out not to be one, and there's a family about to eat tacos who have no idea the dogs exist.