New Pig In Town

Chip is the new pig in class and he notices that Fitch is the only wolf in class. Is Fitch a bad wolf, a werewolf, or just a lone wolf? After their first school day together, Fitch and Chip know one thing is certain -- even if they are really different, they can also be a lot alike, too. Join new friends Fitch and Chip on this first of their humorous and heart-warming adventures.

"Ever since the family got a new pet potbellied pig, things have been perfectly peculiar. The humans have turned into zombies. The bacon's all been trashed. And Monty's only company is that evil parrot Coco LaRue! What's a playful pup to do? Break all the rules, of course! And that includes teaming up with Coco to keep everything from going to the dogs!"--P. [4] of cover.

Chip is the new pig in class and he notices that Fitch is the only wolf in class. Is Fitch a bad wolf, a werewolf, or just a lone wolf? After their first school day together, Fitch and Chip know one thing is certain -- even if they are really different, they can also be a lot alike, too. Join new friends Fitch and Chip on this first of their humorous and heart-warming adventures.

'What was Pig City?' thought Laura. Soon it would be something that everyone wanted to be part of . . . Laura Sibbie is trying to find the perfect 'pigs' for her new club, Pig City: classmates who can keep the biggest secret ever! But to make sure that none of them tells anyone else about the club, each one must give an 'insurance' - something totally embarrassing - to be hidden unless they break the most important law of Pig City. As Pig City grows and the 'pigs' rule the school, the 'insurances' get more daring and when hotshot Gabriel finds out about the club, life gets more risky for the 'pigs' and more complicated for Laura. Is something terrible going to happen? Now there is a new club around, Monkey Town, and they are going to turn Pig City upside down.

From the villainous beast of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs,” to the nurturing wolves of Romulus and Remus and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the wolf has long been a part of the landscape of children’s literature. Meanwhile, since the 1960s and the popularization of scientific research on these animals, children’s books have begun to feature more nuanced views. In Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature, Mitts-Smith analyzes visual images of the wolf in children’s books published in Western Europe and North America from 1500 to the present. In particular, she considers how wolves are depicted in and across particular works, the values and attitudes that inform these depictions, and how the concept of the wolf has changed over time. What she discovers is that illustrations and photos in works for children impart social, cultural, and scientific information not only about wolves, but also about humans and human behavior. First encountered in childhood, picture books act as a training ground where the young learn both how to decode the “symbolic” wolf across various contexts and how to make sense of “real” wolves. Mitts-Smith studies sources including myths, legends, fables, folk and fairy tales, fractured tales, fictional stories, and nonfiction, highlighting those instances in which images play a major role, including illustrated anthologies, chapbooks, picture books, and informational books. This book will be of interest to children’s literature scholars, as well as those interested in the figure of the wolf and how it has been informed over time.

The Mythology of the Animal Farm in Children’s Literature: Over the Fence analyzes the ways in which myths about farmed animals’ lives are perpetuated in children’s materials. Specifically, this book investigates the use of five recurring thematic devices in about eighty books for young children published during the past five decades. The close readings of texts and images draw on a wide range of fields, including animal theory, psychoanalytic and Marxian literary criticism, child development theory, histories of farming and domestication, and postcolonial theory. In spite of the underlying seriousness of the project, the material lends itself to humorous and not overly heavy-handed explications that provide insight into the complex workings of a literary genre based on the covering up of real animal lives.