Tigers at Twilight

Tigers at Twilight by Mary Pope Osborne drops 7 year olds into an Indian forest at sunset, with something growling nearby.

What happens

Jack and Annie are collecting four gifts to free Teddy, a small enchanted dog, from a spell. They have two of them. A pocket watch from the Titanic and an eagle's feather from the Lakota. The third is a gift from a forest far away, and the forest turns out to be in India.

Two grey langurs meet them at the tree house window and take them by the hand into the trees.

At first it is gorgeous. Peacocks spreading their tails, yellow birds, small deer eating red flowers. Annie says it is like paradise. Jack points out that the book Morgan sent is called Wildlife of India, and wildlife means the scary ones too.

Then he spots long deep gashes in a tree trunk, where a tiger has been sharpening its claws.

What follows is a proper scramble up a tree. A growl that seems to come from all directions at once. A python as thick as the trunk they are clinging to. Teddy zipped into Jack's backpack with only his head sticking out.

Your reader gets the facts along with the fright, which is the trick this series pulls off. Jack keeps stopping to read from his book even while his hands are shaking. A wild tiger eats almost 5,000 pounds of meat a year. Tigers usually leave elephants alone.

You should know before you start that this one turns on a tiger caught in a poacher's steel trap, and the book does not soften it. The trapped leg is bleeding. What Jack reads out says plainly that poachers catch tigers, kill them and sell the body parts, that the same happens to rhinos, and that both animals could die out altogether. A child who finds animals in pain hard to read about will find this hard.

For a child who already cares about endangered animals, it may be exactly the right book. Jack and Annie are not there to watch. They make a plan and they use it.

The chapters are short and the print is big, so it moves quickly despite all the information packed in.

This is the third of four gifts and the book explains the first two on its opening page, so a newcomer can start here.

What to read next

If your reader wants the last gift, Dingoes at Dinnertime sends the pair to Australia, where there is a wildfire coming and animals that need moving out of its path.