Title: Taking Candy from a Dog
Author: Vic Templar
Date: June 2010 2nd printing February 2012
Publisher: Blackheath Books
Website: www.blackheathbooks.org.uk
ISBN: ISBN-10: 1-906099-20-0 / ISBN-13: 978-1-906099-20-6
Taking Candy from a Dog, Vic Templar's 2010 novelised memoir of a 70s childhood and family life.
Here's what he has to say about it...
'It’s Like Taking Candy
From A Dog ‘That’s what my uncle Mac used to say whenever he slotted
another goal past me (two grown men against a couple of kids). So I used
it for the title of my book, which is an account of childhood told, for
the most part, by the boy in the 1970s present rather than the adult
looking back.
Stories and episodes from the life of a boy are
threaded together by the musings of a threadbare sock monkey called
Luke. The monkey haunts (or taunts?) the man the boy has become.
Tales
of football, picnics, cats, holidays, rabies, ghosts, skeletons, George
Best, Father Christmas, punk rock, moth rescue, starling execution, ant
holocaust, emu puppets and being winked at by strangers. I have also
latterly come to realise that the book is also my apology to the boy I
once was for the way I’ve turned out.'
And here's what some esteemed reviewers had to say...
Vic
Templar’s Taking Candy From a Dog is the part memoir, part fiction
tale of a very ordinary boy, living a very ordinary life in a very
ordinary part of Kent, yet it is also one of the most touching and
hilarious books you could wish to read about life as a child. It is warm
without being cloying and funny without being too knowing. It is a
tale of picnics, wasps, summers that last forever, Wimbledon, Fred
Perry, the Buzzcocks, Gillingham FC and family life in the 1970s.
Iain Aitch
Written
through the eyes of a frequently bemused and incredulous
child/teenager, with the chapters interspersed by the savvy
interruptions of a sock monkey, it sounds twee, cheesy and to be avoided
but it’s far from it - Taking Candy From A Dog is one of the funniest
books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Wonderfully told with keen
detail and dry wit, some of the dialogue had tears of laughter streaming
down my face.
Mark Raison aka Monkey Picks