Buddy: A Farm in the Forest StoryWritten by Jena Wagmann, Illustrated by Alana HyrtlePublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$16.95 ISBN 9-781988-783895 It’s not uncommon for children’s authors to transform a scenario from “real” life into a story for a picture book, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of Goodsoil, SK writer Jena Wagmann’s new title, Buddy: A Farm in the Forest Story, the actual-experience-to-the-page formula works dog gone well. The retired school administrative assistant-turned-farmer (and writer!) has paired her talents with Nova Scotia illustrator Alana Hyrtle—and if I’m guessing correctly, this is actually a mother-daughter team—to create a heartwarming story with delightful watercolour illustrations about adopting a scruffy Shih Tzu who’d been abandoned in the forest by its previous owner. “Buddy” was “definitely not the handsomest dog they had ever seen—his eyes bulged out of his head, his teeth stuck out on one side of his mouth, and his little black nose did not sit in the middle of his face.” Buddy appears on the cover facing the moon and a star-filled sky above a forest, and it was easy to fall for the “little bit crooked” canine hero who at one…