Dog Tucker
Kathryn Drinkwater
Scholastic
Pub. 2009

December 03, 2021

Devlin has been living in foster homes his entire life. One day he decides he’s had enough. Award-winning novel, Dog Tucker, by Kathryn Drinkwater tells his story.

Dog Tucker is about Devlin, who feels nobody cares about him, so he runs away. He walks down a path for a while until he’s struck in the head by some teenagers and robbed. He is luckily found by the foster home manager and taken back to the home that he just left. He is then told that he will be staying at his uncle’s farm, an uncle that he never knew he had.

When he gets to his uncle’s farm, he is angry and annoyed, thinking that his old foster home doesn’t want him anymore. He’s also annoyed by the fact that he has to do daily chores around the farm. After a week, he is taken to a horse racing stadium. While he is walking around looking at the horses, he hears a horse’s owner talking to the horse racing jockey. He says he is planning to kill his horse if he doesn’t win the next race. This makes Devin panic. He doesn’t want the horse to be killed, so he rushes back to his seat and watches every race closely, looking for the horse. Sadly, the horse doesn’t win. Then something horrible happens and you will just need to read the book to find out what.

Dog Tucker is very well written. It makes you feel like you are there with the characters and experiencing what they are experiencing, such as all the feelings that go with getting ready to sneak out of the house and run away.

It’s also unique and doesn’t remind me of any of the other books that I have read before. This may be because it is a horse book, and I’ve never really been interested in horses before, but I am now. While you are reading, you are learning about how to take care of horses and how to get them set up for racing. Horses require a lot of work. If you ever want to keep a horse, you first have to have a lot of land, or rent a place they can live on.

In this book, I also learned about what it is like to live on a farm. There are so many chores you have to do every day just to keep a farm running and to keep the animals healthy. Devlin does many of these chores in the book, like picking fruit and milking cows.

I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to 10- to 15-year-olds.

Dog Tucker by Kathryn Drinkwater was published by Scholastic in 2009. This book is the author’s first children’s novel. It received a Storylines Notable Book Award for Junior Fiction in 2010.  Kathryn Drinkwater wrote this book to make people more aware about foster care. She even gave a foster care organisation 100 copies of the book.

• Charlie is 12 and lives in Hamilton.