Porcine Eccentric: Business Pig by Andrea Zuill

One morning at the Sunshine Sanctuary for Farm Animals, Jelly Bean the sow gave birth to a litter of piglets.

Right away the volunteers noticed something unusual.

One of the piglets arrived wearing a dark suit and tie and equipped with a briefcase. The volunteers are quickly convinced that this little porcine protagonist is clearly an outlier.

Unlike his siblings, he sips coffee from a white porcelain mug and is too fastidious to grub around in the muck, preferring a shovel to his snout for rooting up grubs.

"I believe what we have here is a gen-u-wine business pig," drawled one of the volunteers.k

The conscientious volunteers construct him an office in an empty stall, with a square bail of hay for a desk, an executive chair, and a computer of his own. Jasper is pleased.

They let him help with the bookkeeping.

And this porker is a worker! Jasper keeps busy tabulating data, totaling his entries, charting his figures in bar graphs, line graphs, and pie graphs, posting flow charts in prominent places. But the stock and the stockholders are unimpressed.

The goat ate his business card.

Little Jasper doesn't quite fit in into the bucolic setting.

His only hope for full employment is to get adopted. He throws himself into an advertising campaign to market his skills. He persuades the local media to feature him. The cows graze in sandwich signs touting his qualifications. He nails posters with tear-off phone numbers onto telephone poles.

Finally Jasper's campaign draws a promising applicant, a woman with a bespectacled little girl who carries... a briefcase!

He was pleased to see she was actually studying his charts! She wanted to exchange business cards. Then she requested his resume'.

A contract is signed, and it's a match made in business school heaven, in Andrea Zuill's forthcoming Business Pig (Sterling, 2018)l the story of a maverick porker who finds the perfect partnership placement.

Author Zuill's comic but understated text is well-paced to set off her delightful design, varying spot art drawings with full-bleed pages which set off her subtle but droll blackline illustrations that invite lingering over each page. A satisfying picture book outing with the premise of placing a square peg in just the right hole.