Odder

Katherine Applegate's Odder is a story in verse for 8 year olds about a sea otter who's far too curious for her own good.

What happens

Odder lives in Monterey Bay. She's three years old, she can backflip and spiral like nobody else, and she'd always rather play first and eat later. Her friend Kairi is the sensible one. Keep your distance from humans, Kairi tells her. Her mother always said to stay away from sharks too.

Odder doesn't listen to either.

The whole book is told in short poems, some only a few lines long, each with its own little title. That might sound like hard work, but it's the opposite. The pages fly by, and the tiny poems about grooming and eating are funny and fascinating. (Her belly doubles as a dinner table!)

Some of the poems belong to the shark. He's young, hungry and small for his age, and when he realises he's bitten an otter and not a sea lion he's a bit embarrassed. It's a clever way to tell it. You end up understanding him too.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The shark attack comes early and it's vivid. Kairi is nipped, Odder turns back to help her and is bitten hard, and she drags herself up onto a beach sure she's going to die. Later, in a flashback, a storm tears baby Odder away from her mother. If your reader gets very upset by animals in pain, this might be too much.

The flip side is how kind the humans are. The aquarium team who rescue her have done it before, when she was a tiny stranded pup. We see them wrap her in towels, feed her from a bottle and teach her how to be an otter, and they cry every time they lose one. It's really moving.

If you've got a child who loves animals and wants to know how they really live, this is a wonderful choice. They'll learn loads about otters without noticing (a million hairs per square inch, anyone?).

What to read next

If they fall for Odder, The One and Only Ruby could be next. It's another young animal cared for by kind humans after losing her mother. Ruby is a baby elephant who was looked after at an orphanage in Africa, and she tells her story in the same kind of short, titled sections.