The Dog Who Saved the World, by Ross Welford, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Dog Who Saved the World, by Ross Welford (middle grade, Schwartz and Wade 2020 in the US), was published in the UK in 2019 before the coronavirus hit....and it's a bit too on the nose to make for real comfort reading, even though it is an engaging and entertaining story.

Georgie loves her dog Mr. Mash fiercely (he's a rambunctious, loving, and unfortunately gassy dog), but her father's new girlfriend, Jessica, is allergic.  Mr. Mash must go back to St. Woof's dog shelter.  Georgie immediately starts spending most of her free time there, taking him out for romps along with her best friend Ramzy.  On one such outing, Mr. Woof runs off with an old woman's bathing cap, destroying it.  

This is Mr. Woof's first contribution toward saving the world, because as restitution the two kids are roped into helping at her impressive, and very private, lab, home to an incredible virtual reality set up.  Georgie is the first guinea pig to try it, and it's certainly impressive.  The virtual reality is more real than even its inventor planned (there is a giant scorpion that crept in unasked for, whose sting is real....).  

Then a terrible dieses shows up in dogs, and begins spreading to people.  Mr. Woof, and all canine kind in England, are slated to be killed in an effort to control it.  Jessica is among the scientists working desperately to find the cure...but it is not happening quickly enough.  

The virtual reality set up is so good, though, that it can be programed to take its users to the future.  And this is how Georgie and Ramzy plan to save the world.  Without Mr. Woof, though, it wouldn't have worked....

There's a lot more to the book--crazy shenanigans are required, for instance, and plottings and planning, along with Georgie's more ordinary concerns about Jessica becoming part of her life, and Ramzy's worries about his own family (they are barely getting by).  And all of it makes for a fun read, and it is really easy to cheer the two kids on, except, of course, that it hits rather close to home.  (I really wish that it wasn't a girl from China who brought the disease to the UK.  The author had no way of predicting the anti-Asian prejudice that happened in the US because of Covid, but it was in retrospect an unfortunate choice on his part).

In any event, the story is a good mix of the serious and the exciting, and dog-lovers, in particular, will be deeply invested in story (spoiler--Mr. Woof survives, and the cure he helps bring back to the present saves many other dogs as well).    

Time travel through virtual reality is a new one for me, and I liked that part more than I did Mr. Woof (I am a cat person).  Though of course it's wildly improbable, it had enough internal logic (of a mad science sort) to it that the improbability didn't matter much to me.  Georgie's actual time in the future was very brief, and rather awful, since it was a time line where the cure came a year later.  But at least that future never ended up happening.