The Tale of Rescue

Michael J. Rosen's The Tale of Rescue is a gripping, beautifully told short book for 9 year olds about a family lost in a blizzard and the cattle dog who finds them.

What happens

A mother, a father and their ten-year-old son have come from Florida for a snowy holiday. The boy has never seen snow before. They ski, build snowmen and have a midnight snowball fight. Then, on the last morning, they set off to walk half a mile to the lodge and the sky simply disappears.

In a whiteout they can't see the lodge or their own cabin. Their footprints fill in behind them. Hours pass. The snow climbs to their waists and then over the boy's head, until the three of them are huddled together in a hollow they've stamped out of the drifts.

Meanwhile, on a farm somewhere nearby, a cattle dog has just finished bringing in her herd. She's fast asleep on the seat of a tractor when she hears a whistle that isn't one of the farmer's.

What follows is quite something. She can't make the farmer understand, so she works it out herself, the only way a cattle dog knows how. No spoilers here (it's too good to give away).

The writing is different from most books for this age. The sentences are long and careful and full of detail, and nobody in the family is ever named. Even the dog mostly gets called with herding words (cast, bye, that'll do). It reads beautifully aloud, and it trusts your reader to slow down and picture everything.

It's tense, too. The family really are in danger of freezing, and the parents don't know what to tell their son. The farmer, frustrated, swats the dog with his torch. There are a few small injuries along the way (a bleeding paw, a bloody nose). None of it is gory, but a very sensitive animal lover might want to know it's coming.

Would your reader cheer for a dog who just won't give up? Then this is for them. It's also a lovely one for a child who's curious about working animals, as you learn a lot about how a herding dog thinks without it ever feeling like a lesson.

What to read next

And if the blizzard is the bit they can't stop thinking about, Snow Struck is another snowbound adventure, about two kids from the South who've been hoping for snow in New York and get far more of it than anyone bargained for.