Freddy the Pig

I enjoy reading to my son a bit every night. He especially likes talking-animal books, so we started off with C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles (awesome!), then we read several of Brian Jacques' Redwall series (quite good). We tackled Robin Hood, King Arthur, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Jeanne Duprau's City of Ember (excellent!) and The People of Sparks (very good), Eragon, Booth Tarkington's Penrod and Penrod and Sam (old and excellent but with some racist - though not intentionally malicious - overtones), Despereaux (okay), Time Stops for No Mouse (good) and The Sands of Time (good), by Michael Hoeye, Ken Oppel's Silverwing (okay), Sunwing (okay), and Firewing (weird), A Cricket in Times Square, and we just finished Lloyd Alexander's series, The Book of Three (first book, fair, others, excellent). But now, what to read? What to read?

Well, for some reason I thought of a series I loved as a child, Walter Brooks Freddy the Pig books. I thought these 26-or-so books were long out of print, but - as I discovered in perusing Amazon - they have been brought back. Happy day! All's right with the world! We picked up Freddy the Cowboy at the library and are reading and enjoying it. I'd have preferred to start with Freddy the Detective, but you start where you can.

Here's a silly snippet. Freddy the pig is asking Quik (a mouse) if Howard (another mouse) can come for a visit:

"I suppose it'll be all right," he [Quik] said. "If he doesn't eat us out of house and home. I never knew a field mouse yet who didn't eat like a pi- I mean, like a pinguin," he said hurriedly.

"What's a pinguin?" Jinx [the cat] asked, and Howard said: "I think he means a penguin. They're very greedy creatures, though seldom seen in this neighborhood."

Quik grinned at him gratefully, but Freddy said: "Penguin nothing! He started to say 'pig' and then couldn't change it to anything that made sense."

My son likes it and so do I, so I think we have reading material to keep us busy for a long time.

Anyway, help revive the Freddy books! There's probably one or two of them left in your public library. Try one, and if your kids (or you) like it, the whole set is available on Amazon.