Marty is the perfect dog—he’s loyal, smart, learns tricks, and everyone seems to love him. Unfortunately, Marty happens to be a 350-pound pig. In Saving Marty by Paul Griffin, 11-year-old Lorenzo Ventura has to figure out how to convince him mom to let him keep Marty, whom he has raised since he was the runt of the litter, while Marty keeps making things more difficult by chewing through fences and running over mailboxes.
Life isn’t particularly easy for Lorenzo, his mom and his grandfather, Double Pop (or just Double, as Lorenzo calls him). Their peach farm is failing, Double’s knee needs to be replaced, and money seems to get tighter each month. Lorenzo is also struggling to accept that his best friend, Paloma, is getting the opportunity to live out their dream at a summer camp for musicians, and he’s dealing with difficult truths about his father, who died just a week before Lorenzo was born. Then there are the Taylor boys, who think that Marty would make particularly good ham steaks.
Saving Marty quickly goes beyond a light story about a boy and his pig. It’s filled with friendship, loss, understanding, acceptance and what it means to be a family, and readers will find themselves caught up in the melodic words of this story. Renzo and Pal, Marty, Mom and Double draw readers into their stories, their lives, their songs. And in the end, maybe Marty isn’t the one who needs to be saved, but instead might do the saving.
