The Leopard Is Loose (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780525655770)

The fragile, 1952 postwar tranquility of a young boy's world explodes one summer day when a leopard escapes from the Oklahoma City zoo, throwing all the local residents into dangerous excitement, in this evocative story of a child's confrontation with his deepest fears

For Grady McClarty, an ever-watchful but bewildered five-year-old boy, World War II is only a troubling, ungraspable event that occurred before he was born. But he feels its effects all around him. He and his older brother Danny are fatherless, and their mother, Bethie, is still grieving for her fighter-pilot husband. Most of all, Grady senses it in his two uncles: young combat veterans determined to step into a fatherhood role for their nephews, even as they struggle with the psychological scars they carry from the war.

When news breaks that a leopard has escaped from the Oklahoma City Zoo, the playthings and imagined fears of Grady's childhood begin to give way to real-world terrors, most imminently the dangerous jungle cat itself. The Leopard Is Loose is a stunning encapsulation of America in the 1950s, and a moving portrait of a boy's struggle to find his place in the world.

Author: Stephen Harrigan
ISBN-10: 0525655778
ISBN-13: 9780525655770
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 01/18/2022
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.55h x 6.11w x 1.14d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2021 pg. 10
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2021
Publishers Weekly 11/29/2021
Booklist 12/01/2021 pg. 31
Library Journal 02/04/2022 pg. 1