Me and Marvin Gardens

Amy Sarig King's Me and Marvin Gardens is a story for 8 year olds about a boy who finds an animal nobody has ever seen before.

What happens

Obe Devlin lives on what's left of his family's land. A hundred years ago the Devlins owned 175 acres. Now there's a small farmhouse, a wild patch, and a creek with the family name on it.

Everything else is being built on. Phase One, then Phase Two, and now Phase Three, which used to be the cornfield he grew up running through.

So Obe picks the litter out of the creek. It's his creek. He keeps a pocket guide to animal tracks so he knows who's been down to drink.

Then one evening something comes out of the brush that isn't a cat or a dog or a possum. It's low to the ground and pig-ish at the front, with hooves that have toes on them. Its skin feels like algae. And it's chewing its way through a plastic bottle, which turns out to be all it ever eats.

He calls it Marvin Gardens, after the square on the Monopoly board where his dad keeps building hotels.

Reading it is like being let in on what a quiet boy actually notices. Obe tells you about mosquitoes, and where the creek water ends up (the Atlantic, eventually), and what was happening in the world a hundred years ago, all in the same steady voice. He's not making a speech about any of it. He just knows.

He's funny without trying, too. His dad's dinner-table opinions arrive as "blah blah blah" because Obe stopped listening ages ago.

One thing before you hand it over. Obe gets nosebleeds because his old best friend Tommy started hitting him, and he's rinsed the blood out of his own sweatshirt about twenty times in six months. His mum had to teach him how on the first day of it.

None of that arrives as a big scene. It sits underneath everything instead, which some children will find worse and others will barely clock. If your reader has ever watched a friend swap them for a new group, they'll recognise every minute of standing at that bus stop.

What to read next

And if the secret animal is the bit they love, try The Last Bear. April goes to live on an island near the top of the world where she's been promised there are no bears at all, and three weeks in she comes face to face with one.