When times are tough, the tough grow their own food.
You all remember Findus the cat, I hope? The cheeky little feline who lives with his human Pettson. Findus Plants Meatballs is the latest in a – by now – long line of translated books by Sven Nordqvist about this most loveable of cats, straight from the Swedish hinterland of the back of beyond.
I can’t help but feel Findus has got the right idea. What’s the point of growing boring things like veg or potatoes? If you really can stick something in the ground and you water it a bit and then it multiplies into many more of what you stuck in the ground, you can’t lose.
So as Pettson sows seeds and puts old potatoes down, Findus plants his meatball. Unfortunately the hens are out and cause havoc in the vegetable patch in their search for lovely worms. So Pettson and Findus have to start all over again. And again, when the neighbour’s pig has been. After which the hens get uppity and refuse to go in, and forget about being scared of the fox.
While on fox-watch Findus ends up permitting an even worse disaster, and Pettson needs to use all his cunning to sort everything out.
This is adorable, as usual. Findus and Pettson would probably be quite annoying in real life, but in a book you just have to love them. You also need to look very closely at all the detail on every page. I’m not sure what the little green creatures are, but on one page there is a ticket booth and a turnstile for viewing the shenanigans in the vegetable patch…
(Try and forget the horsemeat for a few minutes, if you can.)
The Occasional Bookwitch 