Magical Animal Adoption Agency – Clover’s Luck

Kallie George's Magical Animal Adoption Agency - Clover's Luck is a gentle woodland fantasy for 6 year olds about a girl who thinks she's the unluckiest person alive.

What happens

Clover was born under a thin moon and has taken it badly ever since. Burst bike tyres. Burnt toast. A fish that went down the drain.

She paints her room green, keeps a jar of lucky pennies on the sill and carries a wishbone in her pocket. None of it works.

Then her best friend gets the last place at pony camp, a baseball comes through the window, and her new canary flies straight out through the hole.

Chasing that bird takes her further from the village than she's ever been, right up to the edge of the Woods, where everyone at school sings a rhyme about staying away.

She goes in anyway. What she finds is a curling paper notice nailed to a tree, asking for volunteers at an animal adoption agency, with the slips at the bottom untorn.

Clover wants a pet more than anything and has decided she's far too unlucky to keep one. So helping look after somebody else's animals seems like the next best thing.

She has no idea what sort of animals.

The best stretch of the book is simply Clover walking down a row of tanks and stalls reading the cards. A toad under a curse whose warts change colour. Five fairy horses no bigger than her fingernails, rescued from ogres. Two salamanders who breathe steam and are described as immortal.

Then a baby dragon called Snort in a brick pen with buckets of water round it, because he sets fire to things when he sneezes.

Nothing is cute for the sake of it, which is what makes it work. Every card has a history, and most of the histories are a bit sad. There's a small unicorn whose princess owner stopped feeding him and filed his horn down because she thought a rounded one looked smarter (she also named him Mistypoo, which Mr Jams refuses to use).

That's the note to be ready for. These animals have mostly been neglected, abandoned or shown off by people who wanted them as possessions. It's handled softly, no cruelty on the page, but a child who feels things strongly about animals may well go quiet over the unicorn.

The flip side is that it's exactly the sort of book that child will love, because looking after them properly is the whole point.

A bossy witch in a dripping black raincoat turns up early, so your reader will know trouble is coming before Clover does.

What to read next

For another go at the Agency, The Missing Magic is in the library. A new volunteer arrives, he's written books about magical creatures already, and Clover is not at all pleased about it.