Elf Dog LaRue: A Guest Post by M.T. Anderson

Today it is my very great pleasure to bring you a post from author M.T. Anderson himself. Consider this NSFW if you don’t care for openly weeping at your desk.

Generally, authors for kids do not treat kids’ pets kindly. We kill them. It’s awful. Doesn’t matter what the animal is. Dogs, horses, raccoons, spiders. They all die to teach some child an important lesson about life and death.

            It’s traumatizing. As a young reader, I learned to stay away from animal books because I...