I recently read Pig the Stinker, and enjoyed it enough that I wanted to double back and read the first book in Aaron Blabey’s popular picture book series. This led me to reading his 2017 Pig the Pug.
You’ll see the book’s cover below, and I have to ask: can you see a dog face like that staring up at you and NOT want to read the book? I couldn’t. Pugs are already cartoonish, but Blabey exaggerates just a bit more, and adds focus. This dog is staring at you (and me), the reader.
The story is very simple: Pig the pug is very selfish. He doesn’t share his toys, even when his fellow pet Trevor (a wiener dog) wants to play with him. He denies Trevor’s request, gathers all of his toys into a great, unbalanced pile, and then delivers a rant from the peak about how he will never share his toys.
And then he falls. Trevor warns him, but it is too late, and he tumbles a long way. (We don’t see the landing, but one glorious two-page spread shows Pig plummeting from a window. Head first.)
He ends up in a full-body cast, and now HAS to share his toys. At least while he’s healing.
The story is told in rhyming quatrains with very short lines. The first is just four syllables long: “Pig was a pug.” This structure adds speed and pleasure to illustrations that really don’t need it: they are hypnotic.
Good stuff. More Pig to come.
