The Star Dogs

Roddy Doyle's The Star Dogs is a true story for 11 year olds, told by a Moscow street dog who gets picked for a rocket.

What happens

Moscow, January 1951. A small white dog runs into the road in front of a car, so that while everyone is looking at the crash she can pull a parcel of meat out of a shopping basket. It works. Then a net comes down over her.

She has been in the dog pound five days when two men walk along the cages, choosing. They go straight past the big dogs and the dark-furred ones. They want them small, white and quiet.

She works out that this is her way out. So she sits very still and wags her tail, and when the keeper says this one bites, he's told he must be mistaken.

Everything is from her side, and that's what makes it land. She doesn't know what a cosmonaut is. She doesn't know why they weigh her, or why she's been made to drink until the bowl is empty, or what the shaking metal box is for. She only knows when she has passed a test.

A younger dog in the next cage, Dezik, keeps whispering questions. Tsygan (that's the name a scientist gives her, the first one she's ever had) has no answers. She tells her not to be frightened anyway.

The sentences are very short and almost nothing is explained to you. It reads fast and it leaves your reader a lot of room to work things out for themselves.

It's properly funny in places too. The reason the Soviet space programme ended up using only female dogs comes down to one test, one male dog called Boris, and one extremely wet scientist.

Be straight with your reader before they start. This really happened, and the story ends with a page of facts about which of these dogs came home and which didn't. Dezik flew again a week later and the parachute on her capsule failed. It's one plain sentence, with no dwelling on it. If you've got a child who takes animal deaths hard, that sentence will stay with them for a while. A child who already reads real history, and wants to know what actually became of the Moscow street dogs, will want this one badly.

It's short, by the way. Much closer to a long short story than a novel, so it's easy to finish in a sitting.

What to read next

If that plain way of telling things suits your reader, A Greyhound of a Girl is here as well. Mary is twelve, her best friend has just moved to the other side of Dublin, and her granny is in hospital and not coming home.