Peddles by Elizabeth Rose Stanton

PEDDLES WAS JUST A PIG. HE LIVED ON A FARM, DOING THE USUAL PIG THINGS...

WALLOWING AND.... [CENSORED]. BUT PEDDLES THOUGHT ABOUT THE USUAL PIG THINGS...

DIFFERENTLY.

Peddles imagines pizza instead of swill, soaking in a sudsy tub instead of wallowing in mud puddles, and perusing the newspaper while seated on a spotless toilet!

THE OTHER PIGS SHOOK THEIR HEADS AT HIM.

But one night while Peddles is stargazing, he hears whooping and yee-haws coming from the barn. A barn dance is in progress, Cowboy boots are stomping to the beat, and Peddles just has to get in on the act. He peeps in and sees a cat fiddling away and thinks.. . a very un-porcine thought.

WHY COULDN'T HE DANCE?

He finds a pair of castoff red cowboy boots and stuffs his hind feet in them and tries to join the dance.

IT DIDN'T GO WELL.

Cowboy boots take a bit of breaking in, but Peddles gets by with a little help from his friends, in Elizabeth Rose Stanton's Peddles (Simon and Schuster, 2015), as the barnyard pigs rally behind him and join the square dancers on the floor. Yee-haw, all y'all!

Stanton's free-thinking pig is a refreshingly naive but game little hero, and "Stanton's lovely pencil and watercolor illustrations are a thing of beauty," says School Library Journal, and they truly are. Peddles is a cute, roly-poly piglet who is keen to try new things, a think-outside-the-pigpen little porker. Like the eccentric hen-with-arms in her first book, Henny, (read review here), Peddles has the innocent enthusiasm of a toddler who looks at life as the adventure it is.