It's probably fair to say that there isn't another book quite like Saving Emily. While it takes its cues from Black Beauty, Watership Down, The Animals of Farthing Wood and other books that seek to portray the lives of animals in an honest, forthright way, Saving Emily is unique for its humble subject and hero.
Emily is a beef cow, a Hereford heifer growing up on the range in rural USA. Unlike the animals on Old McDonald's farm or the grinning anthropomorphized hamburgers portrayed by McDonald's, Emily lives it like it is. She's tagged, beaten, branded, hauled in cramped, filthy cattle trucks, sold at auction like a steak on the hoof, and sent to a feedlot for fattening.
Author Nicholas Read doesn't pull any punches where the truth is concerned. But nor does he belabour them.That's the gift of the book; it's not dogmatic. Yes, it contains a clear vegetarian message, but it's delivered with subtlety, not a sledgehammer. No one, regardless of his or her opinion on the ethics of eating meat, could ever question its validity as a straightforward children's story, filled with interesting characters - both human and animal - and situations. That's due not just to Emily's story, but also to Chris's, the book's human hero.
Chris is a city boy wrenched from the urban life he knows by his divorced mother when she marries the doctor in a small country town. At first, he is bereft and lost, a virtual fish out of water with no friends and no idea of how to fit into such strange new surroundings. Then he meets Gina, a free-spirited young girl with strong ideas about everything, including animals. Chris likes her immediately, but wishes, for her own good and his, that she weren't so different. The other kids in their country school make fun of her for her outspokenness, and while Chris admires her courage, he can't help feeling sorry for her. Why, he wonders, can't she just be like everyone else? Life would be so much less trouble that way.
It would have been easy - and probably was tempting - for Read to demonize the book's villains. Except even that isn't fair, since the only villain is cruelty. And cruelty to animals is not, as often defined by defensive farmers, a subject that pits "city" people against "country" people. The ranchers are treated fairly. The people fighting to save Emily are far from perfect. Everyone has his or her flaws and colours, and everyone's motivations are given a fair shake. That's what makes the book so readable and so non-judgmental.
Saving Emily is a gripping adventure story, a sympathetic tale about peer pressure versus individuality, and a heart-tugging plea for compassion for every kind of living creature, whether they have four legs or two. In doing that, it creates a niche in vegetarian literature, and fills it brilliantly.