posted on 20 May 2019

McTavish Takes The Biscuit by Meg Rosoff

I first encountered McTavish the dog and his owners, the Peachey family, in the previous book in this series, McTavish Goes Wild. As I explained then, the Peachey family think they took McTavish as a ‘rescue dog’ but the truth is that it’s actually McTavish who spends his time rescuing the various members of the Peachey family from messes and scrapes of their own creation.

So, we see most of what happens from McTavish’s perspective and with a privileged access to the dog’s internal monologue. This time it’s the chaos being wreaked by Pa Peachey’s baking aspirations that he’s going to have to mop up – that is, as long as the discarded baking cast-offs that find their way into his food bowl don’t do for him first.

Most of the Peachey family have discovered the pleasures of cooking – dumping ready-made fast food in favour of good, healthy home cooking. All with the exception of Pa Peachey who just likes to eat it – until one day he’s confronted with supermarket bread for his morning toast. That’s when he decides he must be able to bake better bread himself and he declares himself the next big thing in the baking world.

The only problem is, he isn’t. And everyone can see it except him. But he takes over the kitchen and starts producing the most terrible stuff that no-one except McTavish will eat and he only really likes the cakes that unaccountably taste of liver.

Then something even more terrible happens. Pa Peachey decides he’s going to enter a big, high profile baking competition and he’s absolutely convinced that his plan for a massive and complicated model of the Palace of Versailles made of gingerbread is going to get him first prize.

But McTavish, now full of rejected gingerbread scraps, along with the rest of the family, can see the looming disaster and the humiliation that Pa Peachey is going to feel when his baking is open to public scrutiny. So can anything deflect this family disaster? As judgement day looms and the Palace is looking more like a bombed garage, the only one with a plan is McTavish….

Of course, you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens. As with McTavish Goes Wild, the book is illustrated in the same style and it is published by Barrington Stoke in their Conkers series – which means we get a few extras at the end. You’ll find a recipe for baking your own gingerbread biscuits, a profile of the author and a pen portrait of McTavish himself.

Great fun as always.

Terry Potter

May 2019