A Perfect Time for Pandas

A Perfect Time for Pandas by Mary Pope Osborne is a time-travel rescue for 7 year olds with a big panda detour in the middle of it.

What happens

Penny, Merlin's penguin, is a statue. Teddy cast the spell by accident, and unless Jack and Annie undo it he's out of Camelot for good. They've already found three of the four things that reverse it. The last one is a riddle. A food that's grainy and good, baked with love and tough as wood.

Jack and Annie have twenty-five minutes before school, so they run for the tree house. No problem, says Annie. Jack wants to know how anyone's supposed to eat something tough as wood.

What they do first is order breakfast in China and read the menu out to each other. Chicken feet. Yak butter tea. Fried stinky tofu. Annie laughs so hard she nearly comes off her chair, then they remember the waiter can hear them (Jack goes bright red).

Then she finds a panda centre in the guide book and the mission stops mattering. Seeing real pandas is her life's dream. There are two stuffed ones at home called Roly and Poly.

The panda pages are a joy and stuffed with real facts. Jack thinks the newborn cub looks like a fuzzy pink mouse. It doesn't even weigh half a pound.

Best of all is Bing-Bing, who's supposed to be far too shy to come out. She walks right up to the bars, sits down and puts her paws over her eyes. Jack's meant to be recording her behaviour on a clipboard. He doesn't write a word.

Then the mountain moves.

The quake is real. The book doesn't tone it down. Trees snap. A boulder the size of a car flattens both bikes. A mudslide nearly buries Jack. Back at the centre, staff are trapped in the rubble. Your reader doesn't watch anybody die and no animal gets hurt on the page, but the fright is the real thing. If your child's seen earthquake news, sit with them for this one.

And the choice is a good one. One hour of magic and one direction to spend it in. Town and the hunt for Penny's object one way. The pandas and their keepers the other.

What to read next

If they're after another mission with proper danger in it, A Crazy Day With Cobras drops the pair into India almost four hundred years back, after an emerald in a Mogul emperor's gem collection. And yes, there are real cobras.