Zoe’s Rescue Zoo 12 – The Scruffy Sea Otter

Amelia Cobb's The Scruffy Sea Otter is a Rescue Zoo story for 5 year olds about the littlest pup in the pool.

What happens

Zoe Parker lives at the Rescue Zoo, in a cottage right on the edge of it. Her mum is the zoo vet. A grey mouse lemur called Meep sleeps at the end of her bed and eats most of the bananas.

Zoe also has a secret. She can understand what the animals say, and talk back to them, and she has never told anybody. Not even her mum.

Very early one morning her great-uncle Horace sails home up the river with a crate on the back of his boat. Inside are three orphaned sea otter pups he has brought back from Russia.

Two of them are twins. Nina and Alex, about a year old, and already brilliant in the water. The third is Sasha. She's four months old, half the size of the others, and her fur sticks up in tufts instead of lying sleek and shiny.

Jess the otter keeper needs somebody to give Sasha extra time every day. Zoe's hand goes straight up.

What follows is a lot of patient, hands-on work. Wriggling into a wetsuit (much harder than it looks). Dropping a silver fish and counting to three. Talking a small, cross otter round when she surfaces spluttering and gives up.

Then the zoo announces a daily otter show for visitors, and Mr Pinch, the grumpy manager left in charge, decides the little one isn't up to being in it.

Reading it feels a bit like being handed a job. Great-Uncle Horace scatters facts as he goes. Otters have the thickest fur of any animal in the world. Sea otters crack shellfish open with pebbles, the way you'd use a tin opener.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The pups are orphans because hunters caught their parents for their fur, and Horace explains that on the morning they arrive. If animals being harmed upsets your reader, that's a bit you'll want to be sitting beside them for. It's two sentences and nobody dwells on it, but it is there.

Everything after it is warm. A little animal who can't quite do the thing yet, and a girl who won't give up on her.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, The Lonely Lion Cub is where the Rescue Zoo begins. A tiny lion cub turns up with nowhere to go, and Zoe has to talk a very grumpy old lion into helping.