Strays - Gia Gordon

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆

Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆

Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Campbell Cole has a big heart for all living things, especially strays. It might be because her father, the director of the local animal control, is as aloof as they come, so Campbell knows what it's like to feel alone. 

When she spots an adorable dog being dumped on the street, the last thing Campbell can do is tell her dad. He might take the pup straight to the shelter, where new rescues have just three days to be adopted. The only person she can trust with the truth is her best friend, Luz.

The more time Campbell spends trying to catch the dog, the more he starts to trust her, which is both great and terrible because Campbell knows she can't keep him. But perhaps she doesn't have to. With the help of Luz's father, an army vet grappling with PTSD, she just may find a solution that benefits not only the dog, but everyone else, too."

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Another ARC, already?! I must be on a roll...or it took me a really long time to finish my last one and then I read this one right after and finished it in a couple of days. Could be either, really.

Anyhow, as a card-carrying animal-obsessed person who works at a school full of kids who equally love animals and staff who regularly help rescue lost pups in the neighborhood (I keep an extra leash and harness in my bottom desk drawer just in case and so does our school secretary, that's how often we end up taking in wandering doggos to help track down their owners), I was sold on the idea immediately. 

The thing about it is, though, it is SO SAD, in such a hopeless-feeling way, for MOST of the book. I did end up enjoying it overall, and I'll still give it a shot for my school library, but I'm not sure students will stick with it for the entire almost 300 pages when the bulk of it is such a downer. Up until the last couple of chapters, I had to take periodic breaks to just sit there and feel sad, and my husband even asked me if I was okay a couple of times. That's how sad it was.

I enjoyed Campbell, Luz, and their friendship, and I loved the array of school staff we got to meet. It felt very true to life to have such a blend of staff, teaching styles, and attitudes, and I have to give a shout out to Gordon for having a NICE LIBRARIAN! She was lovely and the kind of librarian that I strive to be. I also enjoyed the dynamic of Luz's family, their interactions with each other and the different types of back-and-forth depending on who was there. Again, very true to life. I thought the characters were one of the highlights of the book. 

Where I struggled was that after creating all these gorgeous, lifelike characters, the plot developed too slowly. Everything that happens in the book is included in the synopsis, and that should not be the case. I think if Campbell had caught the abandoned puppy and come up with the plan for Luz's dad to help them earlier in the book, we could have seen more of what came next and the whole book would have felt more hopeful. Instead, we got like 260 pages of pure sadness and then a fast forward through a solution and next steps. As noted, overall I still think it's a decent read, but I thought it had so much more potential. 

Wildoak - C.C. Harrington

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Maggie Stephen's stutter makes school especially hard. She will do almost anything to avoid speaking in class or calling attention to herself. So when her unsympathetic father threatens to send her away for so-called "treatment," she reluctantly agrees to her mother's intervention plan: a few weeks in the fresh air of Wildoak Forest, visiting a grandfather she hardly knows. It is there, in an extraordinary twist of fate, that she encounters an abandoned snow leopard cub, an exotic gift to a wealthy Londoner that proved too wild to domesticate. But once the cub's presence is discovered by others, danger follows, and Maggie soon realizes that time is running out, not only for the leopard, but for herself and the forest as well. Told in alternating voices, Wildoak shimmers with beauty, compassion, and unforgettable storytelling as it explores the delicate interconnectedness of the human, animal, and natural worlds."

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I just had to go so far back to find what I was calling all my middle grade book reviews, because I hadn't actually included it in a middle grade post since mid-November. That's what I get for picking such a mouthful, which I fully did on purpose...but it's really coming back to bite me. Anyway, I've been making an effort to work my way through the huge stack of books I've accumulated and actually get them read and added to my school library, and I feel like I'm making solid progress with Operation Middle Grade Mega Awesome Super Fantastic Massive Review Spree, or MGMASFMRS for short. Magmas of Mars? No, Magma-Safe Mars. Or Mug Ma's Foamers.

We're getting off topic here. Come on, y'all, focus, please.

A lot of the middle grade books I have in my TBR pile came from random book subscriptions, but this is one I specifically bought with the plan to read and then add to my school library. It ticks multiple boxes - engaging historical fiction, excellent disability representation, addresses issues relevant to my students, AND one of the alternating perspectives is the abandoned snow leopard cub. My kids are huge animal lovers, so I think they'll adore being able to read a story like this, with alternating human and animal points of view. I know I did.

Overall, this story is a pretty simple one - it centers around one main conflict and takes place over the course of just a couple weeks, so there's not a lot to it. The way it's told is so good though, and I loved the way the characters developed, even Maggie's parents, who were really only in the book for the very beginning and the very end. We got to read a lot about Maggie, who is brave, resourceful, and intelligent, and see in interactions with him that her grandpa was gentle, kind, and firm in his convictions, but with what little we saw of her parents initially I was worried they, especially her father, would fall flatter. Happy to report that was not the case. 

I do think some of the other people who lived in Cornwall with her grandpa were kind of caricature-y, but I also think it would have been hard to create a whole village of well-rounded, realistic people within the confines of this story, so it's understandable that people who barely featured weren't as fully developed. Also, frankly, I live in an area with people who, if I were reading about them in a book like this, I would absolutely think were flat, caricature-y characters...some people are just ignorant assholes, I suppose, and perhaps that's the case here.

As noted, this story takes place over a fairly short span of time and focuses primarily on one conflict. I wondered if the simplicity would hurt the story, but I don't think it did. I found the pace to be pretty solid and engaging, and I thought the swaps between Maggie's and Rumpus's perspectives were perfectly timed. Also, many of the POV swaps during more tense moments included very short chapters, which really ramped up the intensity and sense of anxiety around what was happening. So well done. Those moments in particular made it hard to put the book down, and while it clocks in at a pretty robust 336 pages, I found it to be a very quick read. I'm looking forward to adding it to my library and recommending it to students!