Originally published in hardcover in 1972, A Day No Pigs Would Die was one of the first young adult books, along with titles like The Outsiders and The Chocolate War. In it, author Robert Newton Peck weaves a story of a Vermont boyhood that is part fiction, part memoir. The result is a moving coming-of-age story that still resonates with teens today.It manages to evoke a sense of vanished America when neighbors were neighborly, when food was homecooked, and clothes and philosophy homespun.

Robert Peck, a Shaker boy growing up on a Vermont farm, saves a neighbor’s cow and is rewarded with a piglet to raise. However, tough times bring wrenching decisions when slaughtering season comes. Told from the boy’s perspective, this story is both funny and moving, as Robert learns about life, love, and death, and what it means to be a man. Setting: Vermont, 1920s