By James Herriot
Eight animal stories the Yorkshire vet lived and then wrote for children, one animal to each, painted across full pages and told plainly by the man who was actually there.
James Herriot spent his life driving between Yorkshire farms with his arm inside a cow, and out of that he wrote eight stories for children. A half-frozen orphan kitten crawls in beside a sow and gets raised alongside the piglets. A sheepdog who has never once barked opens his mouth one day and lets out a single woof. An old dairy cow, past her best and walked to market to be sold, finds her own way back home. A stray cat nobody owns turns up at a farmhouse on Christmas morning carrying her newborn kitten. Each is a whole story with one animal at the center, eight or ten pages long, painted across full pages by Ruth Brown and Peter Barrett. Herriot tells them the way you'd tell a friend about something that really happened to you, because it did.
The animals carry the youngest listeners and Herriot's judgment carries the older ones, on the very same page, which doesn't happen often. A five-year-old just hears that the cow came home. An older child can also hear that the farmer meant to sell her because she was old and had stopped earning her keep, that this was an ordinary decision on a working farm, and that he changed his mind anyway. Herriot never softens the math of that life, and he never sneers at it either. He tells you what the man decided and leaves you to sit with it. It's also why these are worth reading to a child who's only ever met animals as pets.