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The Midnight Zoo

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LoveReading4Kids Says

LoveReading4Kids Says

Award-winning Sonia Harnett’s poignant magical realism story set in World War Two speaks powerfully about freedom and its importance. When the Germans attack their home, Tomas and Andrej escape carrying their baby sister Wilma in a sack. Travelling on foot through Europe they are searching for safety when they find a zoo, left abandoned after the town has been bombed. Each animal has a story to tell; each speaks of freedom and their sorrow at their loss of it while in the zoo. Sensitively and gently, the lessons from the animals’ experience help the children to reflect on the conflict that surrounds them and what it means for their own society.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Carnegie Medal.

The judges said: With its stunning descriptions and small parables which illustrate the inhumanity of war, and the havoc it wreaks on both people and animals, this is a profoundly moving novel. Unbearably sad in places, but never depressing with its message that accepting death means cherishing life; it is a beautiful fable with a moral message for us all.

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Lovereading comment........This is a brilliantly told magical story that questions what it means to be free. Under cover of darkness, two brothers cross a war-ravaged countryside carting a secret bundle. One night they stumble across a deserted town reduced to smouldering ruins.  But at the end of a blackened streeet they find a small green miracle: a zoo filled with animals in need of hope.  This compelling and ageless fable about war and freedom tells the story of these animals and two children as between them they try to figure out a way to release the animals.

LoveReading4Kids

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