The Storm Leopards

Holly Webb's The Storm Leopards is a Christmas animal adventure for 7 year olds about a girl who wakes up in a tent on a Mongolian mountainside, close to a hidden family of snow leopards.

What happens

Isabelle has just moved up north with her family, a few weeks before Christmas. Her parents are opening a cake shop near Gran and Grandad. She misses her old friends badly, and carol singers on the doorstep only make it worse.

A trip to the zoo helps. While her little sister Tilly is glued to the penguins, Isabelle spots the shy snow leopard that everyone else has missed. In the gift shop she buys a little felt snow leopard, made by a family in Mongolia. That evening she reads about how few are left in the wild, and it leaves her miserable.

She goes to sleep holding it. She wakes up in a round felt tent called a ger, and a girl called Odval is sure Isabelle is her imaginary friend.

At dawn Odval takes her up the mountain to share a secret. A mother snow leopard and two cubs, Sky and Shadow. But three of the family's goats have been killed, and some of the men want the leopard dead.

Holly Webb makes both sides feel real, which is quite something at this age. Odval loves the leopards. She also knows her family can't afford to lose goats, and there's a deal with a charity at stake. Your reader will feel the whole knot of it.

And the details are brilliant! Camels with thick winter wool, a stone pile you walk round three times before adding a rock, tea and dumplings for the neighbours. There's even a fridge and a TV in the tent.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The leopard may well have killed those goats, and Odval is frightened the men will shoot her and leave the cubs to die. Isabelle also reads about snow leopards being hunted for their fur and bones, which she finds very hard. If that's going to be hard, have a chat first. If your reader already cares about endangered animals, it could be just the thing.

What to read next

For another girl whisked far from home to help a young animal whose mother has been shot at, try The Winter Wolf. Amelia finds an old diary in an attic and ends up in a snowy cabin in 1873, where a boy is secretly feeding a wolf pup.