Slug: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Computer firm rep David Watson and his wife Maureen sit down to Sunday lunch. David eats half a slug which was hidden in some lettuce. He goes to bed that night with a terrible stomach ache and awakes with a very bad headache.

Carol Wilton leaves her four-year-old son Paul in the garden to buy some bread and milk, while he sits and watches slugs eat his rabbit. The pairing of Rachel Bright and Nadia Shireen is a match made in heaven: both are talented picturebook authors who have created some of the best books for the younger reader.. In this particular little gem, Rachel Bright adopts the mantel of the wordsmith, while Nadia Shireen presents the complimentary images which, as usual, are worthy of much more than a passing glance.She explores the lovliness of words and the magic of pictures, revelling in a world of jam-eating miniature bears and other made-up animals. Slugs in the cellar of an old house feed on scraps of rotten meat someone is unknowingly throwing down to them. Mike Brady, an almost-40-year-old council health inspector awakes with wife Kim, 35, and discusses that he has to help evict a council tenant Ron Bell that day. Brady accompanies Archie Reece, bailiff, to serve an eviction notice on Ron Bell. They find Bell's mutilated body. The slugs leave Ron Bell's cellar, crawl up into his garden and then down into the sewers towards a new housing estate. Field guides used to be just that– a set of illustrations and keys that enabled accurate identification of a particular group of animals or plants. Recently they have included so much more and this excellent guide is a good example of this inclusive approach. It doesn't neglect the identification task, for there are really clear and full sets of photographs of every species of slug found in Britain and Ireland, showing different aspects, including the underside of the foot, the slugs in their curled shapes, all with annotations and a guide to the colours that the slugs can adopt. There is also a very full, useful and user-friendly multivariate identification section, which is very helpful indeed [...] Overall this could genuinely claim to be a complete text on the biology and ecology of slugs. It can be highly recommended." The book stars a slug named Doug who “needs a hug.” Doug consistently misses the love boat. He seeks affection in all the right places from creepy-crawlies he thinks might be interested in him, but he’s shot down time and again.

Finally, Slug happens onto a real looker—Gail the snail. She sports lips as red as cherries, cateye glasses and a shell that mimics a leopard skin coat. The couple even visits romantic Paris to view the Eiffel Tower, but their romance falls flat. In recent years, those working on terrestrial molluscs have expehenced an increasingly frustrating time in the task of identification. Although some species are relatively easy to identify, others can be extremely difficult to separate. It's a problem that has arisen thanks to the arrival and spread of non-native species as well as the realisation that some established species may have been incorrectly named or are actually a group of closely inter-related species, typically requiring specialist Identification techniques to resolve.Gravedigger Charlie Barnes digs up a grave during the night to rob the occupants valuables, but is eaten alive by slugs when he falls in. The clunky rhyming in this book will keep it out of my story times. There is so much rhyme for rhyme's sake - Doug, hug, slug, snug, bug - and yet the author also rhymes all of these words with "love." It feels sloppy and uncomfortable to read aloud. Brady goes to see if the poison has done its job, but although some of the pellets have gone, the slugs are still there. This story relies too heavily on alliteration to choose words that are clear to the intended audience age levels. It's fine to use words above age level here and there, but there are complete sentences here that many adults would likely need to figure out, with no contextual language clues. Some of this is due to common language usage changes since this book was written perhaps.