A boy walks into the house holding a baby skunk.
His name is Travis, he is Callie's soft hearted brother, and the skunk is an orphan he calls Stinky. It goes better than you would think. Then Travis turns up with the litter mate, Winky, and it goes worse. The rest of the book is two children keeping two skunks out of their mother's sight, and out of range of her nose, which is a plot that writes its own jokes.
It is the first of the Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet chapter books, and it is the funniest of them by a wide margin.
The science it actually teaches
Skunk behavior, and better skunk behavior than most nature books bother with.
Start with the thing almost everyone has backwards. A skunk does not want to spray you. Spraying costs it something real, because the supply is limited and takes days to build back, and a skunk that has just used it is defenceless until it does. So a skunk warns first. It stamps its front feet, it raises and fans the tail, it may charge a short distance and stop. Every one of those is a sentence, and every one of them means the same thing, which is go away, I would rather not.
That is the single most useful animal fact in this book, and it is worth your child owning, because the warning is the part you can actually act on.
The spray itself is not urine, which is the other thing everyone has wrong. It is a musk from a pair of glands under the tail, and it is oily, which is why plain water does nothing and why the smell stays in a dog's coat for a fortnight. And baby skunks can spray. People assume the babies are safe to pick up. They are not.
Underneath the comedy there is a second fact doing quiet work. A skunk keeps night hours. It is awake and busy at exactly the time its keepers are asleep, and it is built for a life outdoors that no amount of hand feeding talks it out of. That is the engine of half the trouble in this book, and it is the reason a skunk is never going to be a pet no matter how well the first week goes.
The child it lands with
The child who thinks bathroom humor is the highest form of art. There is a lot of that here and it is done well.
The reluctant reader who has been handed too many worthy books. This one is short, illustrated, funny on the first page, and about an animal that sprays people. It is a good first chapter book for a child who has decided that reading is a chore, and it is the right place to start the series.
Also the softer child, the one who feeds strays and cries at the vet's office, because Travis is that child and the book likes him for it without pretending he is right.
One place to stop and talk
Stop the moment Travis decides not to tell his mother, and ask one question instead of giving a speech: who should he have asked?
Your child will defend him, because your child would have done the same. Fine. Then say who they should really call in your family, by name. A parent first, then a vet or the state wildlife office.
What to know going in
This is a gentle, funny book. The caution is not about what is on the page. It is about what the page models.
Two children take a wild animal into the house and hide it from an adult, and the story rewards them with a good time. In the real world a baby skunk is one of the animals a child should never pick up. Skunks are a main carrier of rabies across much of North America, and a bite or a scratch from one is a genuine medical matter, not a story. None of that makes the book a bad buy. It makes it a book you say one sentence about before you hand it over, and then you have used a funny story to teach the thing a lecture never lands.
The smell jokes are constant, if that is a thing that wears on you.
And the grade band runs high, as it does across this series. The store tags 4 to 7. This reads like a chapter book for a seven or eight year old, with pictures and short chapters. It is a fine independent read at the bottom of that band and a fine read together below it. A confident sixth grader will be done in an hour and will not think much of it.
Where to get it
Start here. Skunked! is the first Girl Vet book and $8.99, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether your child wants three more of them. For a reluctant reader I would hand this one over ahead of anything else on the Stealth Science shelf, because it is funny on page one and short enough to finish.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Squirrelly Situation: When a Wild Baby Comes Home
A Squirrelly Situation by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Counting Sheep: A Birth, a Broken Wing, No Vet
Counting Sheep: Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Emi and the Rhino Scientist: How One Calf Happened
Emi and the Rhino Scientist by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
