The Three Little Pugs and the Big Bad Cat

One day, Mama Pug tells her three little pugs that it’s time to leave home and build houses of their own. In the woods, Bubbles builds a house of straw, and Bandit a house of sticks, but they’re no match for the feline ingenuity of Big Bad Cat, the meanest moggy around, with her array of hairdryers and leaf-blowers.

Unlike the Wolf, the Big Bad Cat manages to get inside Beauty’s sensible brick house – but wait! Whose voice is that, calling 'Muffin! Din-dins!'?

Using a photomontage style with pug photos alongside painted illustration makes this fun fairy-tale retelling stand out from other animal books, and plays on the current vogue for all things pug. The fact that it’s Beauty, the girl dog, that pits her wits against the arch-villain girl cat, is also a good touch, and the happy ending – where’s no-one’s really that happy – is a tongue-in-cheek message about compromise.