Stick Dog Meets His Match

Tom Watson's Stick Dog Meets His Match is a funny story for 7 year olds about five stray dogs, two stolen coffees and one very bad idea.

What happens

Stick Dog lives in a pipe under the motorway with Mutt, Karen, Poo-Poo and Stripes. It's the first warm morning of spring, and Karen the dachshund has decided that coffee is sunshine and unicorns and lightning and fairy dust, all mixed together.

She's had it once. That's enough for her to want a quest.

The plan they settle on is Poo-Poo's, and Poo-Poo's plan involves head-butting a bin, wheeling off two toddlers and leaving a ransom note. Stick Dog's halfway through explaining why they're not doing that when the toddlers start yelling for muffins and both coffees get put down on the pavement.

So the dogs get their coffee. What nobody spots is that Karen's got the extra-large caramel mocha with three extra shots, and the other four are sharing a decaf.

Karen after that is the best thing in the book. She bolts off to a gym car park and then can't remember why she went, so she runs up and down it instead. She digs a hole she's extremely proud of. She talks without stopping.

Then Poo-Poo smells meat. Not one meat. All the meats.

The others decide it must be buried treasure and start digging for a pirate chest, which Stick Dog doesn't bother arguing with. He goes and looks at the lorry instead, and through the passenger window he sees a German shepherd with a length of yellow rope in her mouth and a name tag saying Lucy. That's the match.

What makes these work for a newish reader is the writer butting in. He stops mid-scene to tell you about the morning his mum ran out of coffee and drove him to the supermarket instead of school (then wished him luck at the science fair). The jokes are broad, the dogs' reasoning is gloriously daft, and Stick Dog quietly keeps everybody alive while it's going on.

It sits well into a long series and the dogs refer back to earlier adventures, but you can pick this one up cold without missing a thing.

What to read next

If they want another food raid with the same crew, there's Stick Dog Gets the Tacos.