Stick Dog Takes Out Sushi

Tom Watson's Stick Dog Takes Out Sushi is a very funny story for 7 year olds about five stray dogs, one mystery stick and a great deal of confident nonsense.

What happens

It starts with Mutt's stomach. It rumbles so loudly inside the pipe where the gang sleeps that Karen can't nap, so Stick Dog talks her through pretending it's thunder from a rainstorm miles away. That works beautifully, right up until Karen imagines a whole forest of fallen branches, gets extremely excited about sticks, and is more awake than ever.

Lucky for her, Mutt has some. Mutt has everything. He shakes himself and out comes a pencil, a tennis ball, two bottle caps, a mitten, two socks and six thin sticks, all the same size and pointed at one end.

Stripes is the one who licks a pointy end. Three flavours, she says. Red, brown and green.

Poo-Poo then explains those flavours at length, because Poo-Poo considers himself the group's food expert, and honestly his description is rather good. Karen has a theory too. The sticks grew on a tree. A tree that grows fish.

Stick Dog points out that fish need water. Poo-Poo offers to settle it by holding his breath for a couple of weeks. He manages three seconds.

That's the joke this one runs on. Four dogs are cheerfully, magnificently wrong about how the world works, and Stick Dog is the patient one steering them towards actual food without ever making them feel silly. Your reader gets to be the one who knows better, which is a lovely place for a seven-year-old to sit.

Getting to the restaurant by the lake takes ages, naturally. There's a squirrel to chase up a swing set first, and a hunt for a rocket ship or a jet pack to reach it. Then a canoe drifts off with three dogs aboard, because Mutt found the rope and chewed through it, and what was he supposed to do? He's a dog. There was a rope.

Their rescue plan is to wait until morning, when the sun will evaporate the whole lake in ten or fifteen minutes. At the most.

It's all appetite and daft logic, and it reads aloud beautifully.

What to read next

If your reader wants more of the same crew, Stick Dog Gets the Tacos is in the library. That one opens with Karen sprinting into the pipe to declare an emergency, and a family laying out tortilla chips and guacamole where five hungry strays can see them.