Wishbone

What's the story? It always starts the same way: an ordinary afternoon in the small town of Oakdale, an ordinary Jack Russell terrier with extraordinarily good taste in books, and a nose for the moment when real life starts to rhyme with a great one. That's Wishbone. He can't tell you he's the hero of every classic ever written, but he knows it in his bones, and the instant a schoolyard scrape or a neighborhood mystery echoes Homer or Dickens or Dumas, he's off — imagining himself into the leading role, four paws and all. The books run on two tracks. The Adventures of Wishbone retell the canon with our terrier starring — Beowulf, Robin Hood, Treasure Island — while a modern Oakdale subplot mirrors the same lesson. The Wishbone Mysteries send Wishbone and his boy Joe Talbot, plus friends Sam and David, after original present-day whodunits. Longer Super Adventures and Super Mysteries stretch the format; The Early Years drops down for the smallest readers, back when Wishbone was a pup. A whole kennel of writers — Carla Jablonski, Michael Anthony Steele, Alexander Steele, Nancy Holder, Vivian Sathre — keep the voice steady across all of it. The trick, and the charm, is that gateway structure: chase the story you came for and you leave knowing a classic you didn't. The books stand alone, so begin anywhere — an Adventure for the literary leap, a Mystery for the detective work. That's my kind of story.