Stick Dog Gets the Tacos

Tom Watson's Stick Dog Gets the Tacos is a daft dog story for 7 year olds about five strays, one panicked emergency and a great deal of guacamole.

What happens

Stick Dog lives in a pipe under Highway 16 with Mutt, Poo-Poo, Stripes and Karen. He's just fallen asleep, for twenty-seven seconds, when Karen comes sprinting in with two super-important discoveries.

The first one takes a while. Karen has worked out that her legs are growing, because she stood in the same puddle twice on a hot day and the second time it only came up to her ankles. Stick Dog knows exactly what happened to that puddle. He says nothing about it, and instead tells her why being the small one is the best thing about her.

Then Karen tells him what's special about him. He isn't as clever as the rest of them. Not understanding things is what makes him special, she explains, kindly. (Stick Dog has to work quite hard not to laugh.)

The second discovery is the emergency. Karen saw some little humans in a back garden, under an oak tree, hitting a dog with a stick. Stick Dog shouts, everybody runs, and it takes the rest of them several chapters to get anywhere near the truth.

That gap, between what the dogs are certain is happening and what's actually happening, is the whole engine of the book. Stripes decides to test whether dogs can climb trees, and one of her methods is sitting at the bottom of the trunk with her paws on her head chanting "I am up in the tree". Poo-Poo keeps waiting for somebody to confirm that squirrels would be extinct by now if only he had tree-climbing powers. Mutt has a serious announcement to make about gloves and mittens.

It's very funny out loud, partly because the dogs interrupt each other constantly and never once get to the point.

If your reader has a soft spot for animals, the dog-being-hit part is worth a mention first. It runs for four or five chapters before anybody finds out what the thing in the tree really is, and Karen is genuinely frightened for that stretch. Once it's cleared up, it's tacos and nonsense the rest of the way.

What to read next

Anyone who takes to this crew can have another go at them in Stick Dog Crashes a Party. That one starts with Mutt shaking a mysterious squishy packet out of his fur, Poo-Poo pressing it too hard, and everybody deciding on the spot that Karen is bleeding to death.