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Meg Cannistra's How to Heal a Gryphon is a sunny, magical adventure for 8 year olds about a girl who'd much rather heal creatures than people.
Giada Bellantuono lives in Positano, on the Amalfi Coast, where magic is real and her family are famous healers. Her thirteenth birthday is a week away. That's when she's expected to promise to heal people for the rest of her life.
Giada doesn't want to. She wants to look after animals, the ordinary kind AND the magical kind. And she's already been doing it in secret.
So when she's late for class and her backpack starts going chirrup, chirrup, you can guess what's inside. It's a baby gryphon called Piccolina, who ends up perched on Giada's head in front of everyone!
Giada is such good company. She's cheeky to her teacher. She counts every step she climbs (1,927 up one cliff!). She keeps a vet's log full of drawings. And she's fed up of living in the shadow of her perfect big brother, Rocco, who everyone thinks is wonderful.
Up on the clifftop, Piccolina's mamma appears. She's enormous, and she's hurt. Does Giada break the rules and help? You'll have to read it, but it's worth knowing the wound is a nasty, infected one and it's described in a bit of detail.
Then there's the bigger adventure. With Mamma and Papa away, some witches snatch Rocco, and nobody but Giada can go after him, down into a magical city under the ground.
The Italian setting is gorgeous. Bougainvillea climbing up a tower, the blue-green sea, lots of Italian words and a LOT of food. Even a telling-off bubbles up in her memory like chunks of veal in osso buco!
If you've got a reader who loves animals and has ever felt their family had plans for them that didn't quite fit, they'll really root for her. Giada is about to turn thirteen, so she might feel a little older than your reader, but she's very easy to like.
If the gryphon was the best bit, Bruce Coville's Hatched is about a young griffin who's nervous, writes terrible poems and doesn't feel fierce at all.
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