Read Willodeen free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Katherine Applegate's Willodeen is a story for 8 year olds about a girl who loves the one animal in the valley that everybody else wants gone.
The animals are screechers. They're about the size of a baby bear, plum-coloured and bristly, with needle teeth, curly tusks and tails like burnt flapjacks covered in quills. They scream at night for no reason anyone can work out. And when something startles them they slap that tail down and produce a smell Willodeen describes as a hundred rotten eggs, plus some scoops of dead fish, plus a splash of skunk (her ma gives up on boiling the clothes and burns them).
People say screechers kill livestock and pets. Willodeen's pa, who has looked, says they eat grubs, worms and snails. That's the whole argument of the book in two sentences, really.
She sees her first ones when she's six, out hunting sunberries with him. A mother screecher and five squirming babies. Her pa makes her sit on a rock and watch, stink and all, and tells her the thing she keeps coming back to for the rest of the story. Nature knows more than we do, and she probably always will.
Willodeen tells it herself, years later, looking back. The voice is plain and dry and very warm, and it's the best thing here.
A few weeks after that berry hunt, her mother, her father and her little brother Toby all die in the Great September Fire, along with most of the family's animals. It's told in two sentences and the book doesn't dwell on it, but it is the whole shape of her life afterwards, and she's taken in by two neighbours. Screechers are also hunted with arrows throughout, because the village wants rid of them.
For a child who has lost someone, that early stretch may be a lot, and it arrives without much warning. If your reader is the sort who adopts woodlice and worries about wasps, though, they'll recognise Willodeen on the first page and stay with her all the way.
Her pet hummingbear Duuzuu is the other half of it. Small enough to sit in a coat pocket with room for a biscuit, wings too singed by the same fire to fly properly, and unable to join the flocks that migrate to the village every winter. Different, solitary, and stuck with her. She rather hopes she's enough.
If that lands, try Applegate's Endling. It starts with Byx, the smallest and youngest of a pack of doglike creatures who've been hunted very nearly out of existence, and who is quite sure she'll be the first of them to go.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
