Haven

Haven by Megan Wagner Lloyd is an animal adventure for 8 year olds, and its hero is a house cat who has never once been outdoors.

What happens

Haven has a very good life. She wakes to the smell of bread rising, she sits on her favourite heating vent, and Ma Millie calls her My Sweet and means it.

She hasn't been outdoors since she was a kitten. She turned up at that door with bleeding paws, out of a cold forest she can barely remember, and she has never once wanted to leave.

Then Ma Millie starts coughing.

Just a tickle in her throat, she says. Then it isn't. The bread stops. The fires stop. The shopping stops. Haven climbs onto the bundled shape on the couch and purrs the things she can't say out loud.

On the night the wind takes out the phone line, Ma Millie says it properly. Oh, Haven. I'm in trouble.

So Haven makes a plan. There's one neighbour out this far, Jacob Levan, the big bearded man who brings apples and smells faintly of cows. Find him and he'll come. Ma Millie opens the window, and a small indoor cat drops into the dark.

What's lovely about reading this is how much of it arrives by nose. Bread, cow, wood smoke, the cold mud of a pasture. Haven works out where she is by smell before she works it out by sight.

The animals talk to each other too. There are three cows in the middle of an argument. There's a fox who isn't hungry at all, just BORED, and rather fancies an adventure. And there's a bobcat who could have killed the rabbit he was watching ages ago and chose to keep watching instead.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Ma Millie gets properly ill in the first few chapters and the story stays in it. Haven watches her shake, listens to her heart at night, and lies awake wondering what happens to a cat with no home. It isn't one sad scene and then over.

Haven also cuts her paw on a smashed bowl, and the bobcat kills things and enjoys it. None of it is gory. It isn't cosy either.

For a child who takes it as an adventure, though, it's a terrific one. Small animal. Enormous night. One job to do.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, A Pup Called Trouble is another animal who leaves the only safe place he knows. Trouble is a coyote pup who stows away in a truck out of pure curiosity and ends up completely lost, with a crow and an opossum for company.