Pet Survival Quests & Ancient Egypt Secrets: Surviving the Unknown! 🐾

Book Quest and Be a Reading Hero with Skandar this summer, perfect for fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Get ready for epic sky battles, bloodthirsty unicorns, and friendships that will last forever. Hello and welcome to the Fun Kids Book Quest podcast. My name is Bex, I love books, and on the way for you today I've got two brilliant ones. A non-fiction and a fiction just to keep you all on your toes and make sure there's something for everyone.

Coming up, I've got historian Bettany Hughes telling us about what life was like for children in ancient Egypt. But first up, it's Steve Cole with The Wild Ones, set in a world where humans have disappeared and animals are taking over. The door to the food room stood ajar with only blackness beyond. Ears pricked and hackles rising, scamp padded over.

There it was, scuffling and scratching in the ceiling, followed by a quiet thud. I can't see anything, Scamp said. Hey, Petticake, can I get an assist? Rearing up on his little hind legs, Petticake helped nudge open the door to the food cupboard.

As dim light fanned the shadows, Scamp saw something that made his heart hop and his ears flatten. One of the ceiling tiles was bulging overhead. Scamp heard hoarse, panting breaths. The things, he realised, they've got inside our home.

They're breaking through. I need to talk to you about this book because we are meeting quite an exciting new gang of characters. We'll start off with Scamp. Now, he is in a kind of pet care centre, right? That's right.

And he's got an old gang with him. His gang are a parrot called Falstaff, two dwarf hamsters, Nudge and Wink. There's a cat called Chandelier and a sausage dog called Petter Cake we mentioned there. And a rabbit, a rather nervous, twittery rabbit called Punzel.

And they're in the Pet Care Centre and it's quite obvious that things aren't quite right in the outside human world. This is it. There's something of an apocalypse has happened. The city is ruined. Everyone's moved out.

And these poor pets were left behind. And with unknown things trying to get into their home, they're forced to go outside for the first time for some of them and make their way to a place of safety if they can find one.

Yeah, this is a big adventure trying to find a new home from the place they've all got to know each other. And also, we need to mention Lovely Pam, who was the one who was looking after all of them.

Yes, Lovely Pam, the supervisor, when everyone else evacuated she couldn't bear to leave the pets behind and so she stayed with them and she trained them uh not to eat each other in some places uh to try and um you know ration their food a little she gave them some basic survival skills but then

she when she realized help wasn't coming she tried to go outside and um and find some help for them all but uh she hasn't come back as yet and so of course the pets go looking for her Now, what was it like writing a kind of apocalypse book, but based on the animal's point of view? Because you hear it normally from the human's point of view Well, that was exactly it, and that's what made me think

I got the idea during lockdown after the big COVID worldwide incident And, you know, I was thinking how happy the pets were to have their families at home They had no understanding of what had happened or what caused this, but they were enjoying it. And I started thinking, well, what if they were the ones who had to kind of cope and adjust and get used to a new kind of normal?

What would they do then? Because, of course, pets are so loving and so innocent. They don't deserve something awful like that to happen. And when you're thinking of story ideas, then, of course, sometimes you want to explore these things. There was a Disney film I watched as a kid called The Incredible Journey, which was remade in the 1990s as Homeward Bound, about two dogs and a cat who travelled vast stretches of wilderness to get back home.

So I was thinking of a kind of a wider pet journey, but through not the natural wilderness, but through an urban landscape, which has been turned into a frightening, darker shade of itself. and which, of course, raised the stakes for the pets because there's no one to look after them. They have to learn to become the wild ones

if they're going to survive and thrive. Yeah, there is a bit in the book where they see a football pitch where Scamp is like, oh, I'm used to seeing the white lines and people kind of like chucking a ball across there.

And it's just not the same as they remember. The whole world outside is very different to the one they had been going to. That's right. And some of them have never been out in it. and Punzel the rabbit knows that pet rabbits can't survive in the wild.

He's probably the most scared of them all. While he's also a very intelligent rabbit, he is a rather melodramatic and nervous one. They all have their own characters

and that's what made the book such a happy thing to write. Although the situation is dark, I think there's lots of humour and some big adventure that goes on. They get closer together.

They find what they have in common, what they have that sets them apart, and each contributes in different ways. So it was really lovely to take the pets on this journey, which from like placid ownership all the way into actively deciding their fates, becoming wilder as they have to. Did you have one character who you kind of kept coming back to, like one that you kept writing about more just because you kind of like were uncovering more about them as you wrote? Yes, well, they all had that sense of them, actually.

It's interesting. The dwarf hamsters, Nudge and Wink, they developed their own personality in the writing of it. Starting off, you know, hamsters are cute.

I've had lots of hamsters. And so all the pets are kind of based on animals I have known in my time. And I've always had rescue dogs as well. So having Petter Cake and Scamp there sort of drew from several dogs in my life

that were all taken from rescue shelters.