Each Friday I share the link to a read-aloud preview of a book from SRCSA library. The “First-chapter Friday” selection for March 31, 2023 is Wildoak, by C.C. Harrington.
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. Wildoak was the winner, in 2023, of the Schneider Family Book Award, presented by the American Library Association.