Lily to the Rescue: Lost Little Leopard

W. Bruce Cameron's Lily to the Rescue: Lost Little Leopard is a gentle animal story for 7 year olds where a dog's cleverest trick is lying on her back doing nothing at all.

What happens

Lily tells the story herself. She's Maggie Rose's dog, and she spends her days helping the animals at the rescue Mum runs (Lily calls it Work). This is the fifth Lily to the Rescue book, but it's a brand new adventure and reads perfectly well on its own.

Dad's a game warden. He's just arrested a man up in the mountains who's been smuggling wild animals to sell. Most of them are noisy red parrots. But tucked into a crack between some boulders is a very frightened leopard cub, and she won't come out for anyone.

So in goes Lily. She tries Sit. She tries Down. She tries Shake. In the end it's a trick she copied from the laziest dog she knows that does it (and she's still a bit put out that he got a treat for it).

The cub turns out to be an Amur leopard. There are fewer than a hundred left in the wild, so this little one matters a LOT. Maggie Rose names her Nala.

Then Nala goes off to the zoo, where she stops eating. She only comes out when Lily's there. So the zoo vet asks the family a huge question. Could Lily stay with Nala, maybe for more than a year?

That's the heart of the book, and it's a big-feelings one. Maggie Rose cries into Lily's fur, and nobody pretends it's easy. A child who's very attached to their own pet might want you close by for those chapters. If they love animals, though, it's a lovely way into why people work so hard to protect the rare ones.

There's plenty to giggle at in between. Lily is sure every bottle of milk must be meant for her (it never is). She can't work out why the family keeps talking to a phone they call Dad. And there's a Rottweiler puppy called Jax who thinks Lily is something to climb on.

Lily doesn't understand half of what the humans say, and your reader will be one step ahead of her the whole way. That's a really nice feeling for a newer reader!

What to read next

Lily's knack for calming a scared animal goes right back to the very first Lily to the Rescue book. A young crow with a hurt wing won't come near her at the dog park, so she lies still in the grass and waits.