[3] While skipping school one day, twelve-year-old Rob Peck finds himself assisting a neighbor's cow through the delivery of a pair of calves (and saving her life from her goiter).
A Day No Pigs Would Die, like many of Peck's books, draws from his childhood experiences, dealing with the maturation of children growing up in country settings in the early part of the twentieth century.
The Peck family and their neighbors all farm and engage in animal husbandry, including butchering and preparing their own meat, and Rob's life is strongly limited by the isolation of his environment.
The Peck family, living during Calvin Coolidge's presidency shortly before the beginning of the Great Depression, is poor, and it is their poverty that necessitates one of the tragedies of the book.
[4]: 127–128, 137–139 And, in the closing chapters of the text, Haven Peck comes down with "an affection", sickens and dies, leaving Rob to arrange his funeral and then deal with the fact that, now thirteen, he must be considered a man for the sake of his family's continued welfare.
[4]: 121, 142–144 A Day No Pigs Would Die grossed $300,000 in its first four months in stores, drawing the attention of Twentieth Century Fox, who approached Peck about creating a film adaptation of the novel.
[8] In a nationwide survey of English teachers and librarians conducted in 1976, A Day No Pigs Would Die, was one of only four books (Cormier's The Chocolate War, Zindel's The Pigman, and Hinton's The Outsiders were the other three) that was recommended more than four times.
[9] The Cleveland Plain Dealer said that A Day No Pigs Would Die is "a fantastic adventure, told simply and graphically, with echoes somehow of Mark Twain and of Stephen Vincent Benet".
[10] The New York Times claimed that "you'll find yourself caught up in the novel's emotion from the very opening scene which will grab you and not let you go...love suffuses every pages" and likened it stylistically to True Grit and Addie Pray.
[11] The Boston Globe deemed it "honest, moving, homely in the warm and simple sense of the word," and Jerry Weiss[12] and James Alexander have agreed, calling it, respectively, "homespun culture at its finest" and "a bucolic gentle book".
[19] Parents have objected to the book's "graphic and gory descriptions" of animals being bred, born, and dying, as well as to its including such "shocking content" as an unmarried couple cohabiting.
[22] There has also been some concern that A Day No Pigs Would Die would have a negative influence on adolescent male readers, conditioning boys to view "violence and killing as a part of their initiation into the adult world".
[23]: 57 A Day No Pigs Would Die has been seen as a particularly vicious example of the young adult novel stereotype that boys become men only after committing an act of violence against an animal or another part of the natural world.
Rob, after helping his father slaughter Pinky, is told that he now knows what it is to be a man, enforcing the idea that boys must pass into the "cult of the kill" in order to mature.
From the first page, A Day No Pigs Would Die pulls readers into its world and holds us fast with a combination of harsh realism, tenderness and laughter that sweeps to the heartbreaking ending."