Wildoak

I read Wildoak by C.C. Harrington after seeing it won the Schneider Family Book Award this year. The book description says, "In 1963 London, Maggie Stephens’s stutter makes school especially hard. She will do almost anything to avoid speaking in class or calling attention to herself. So when her unsympathetic father threatens to send her away for so-called “treatment,” she reluctantly agrees to her mother’s intervention plan: a few weeks in the fresh air of Wildoak Forest, visiting a grandfather she hardly knows. It is there, in an extraordinary twist of fate, that she encounters an abandoned snow leopard cub, an exotic gift to a wealthy Londoner that proved too wild to domesticate. But once the cub’s presence is discovered by others, danger follows, and Maggie soon realizes that time is running out, not only for the leopard, but for herself and the forest as well."

This was a nice read, and I got through the book very quickly. I really liked Maggie as a character, and based on my limited experience with stutters, I feel like the book did a good job describing what it would be like to live with that difficulty. (My 6-year-old has a mild stutter, and his speech therapist has given advice like to give him time to finish and not finish words/phrases for him, which Maggie had someone doing to her and it really bugged her.) I was kind of hoping at the end to find an author's note saying the author struggled with stuttering, but she didn't. But I did enjoy the story and seeing Maggie find herself throughout the book and also watching her dad change. I really liked the character of Maggie's grandpa as well. My daughter loves snow leopards, so I think she'd enjoy this book.

Rating: * * (2/3 = Liked it)