Winner of the 2023 Schneider Family Book Award
Maggie Stephens' stutter makes school especially hard. She will do almost anything to avoid speaking in class or calling attention to herself. So when her father threatens to send her away for "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.