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Jump to navigationJump to searchA Tiger Too Many by Antony Wootten (view source)
Revision as of 18:42, 2 November 2011
, 18:42, 2 November 2011no edit summary
It was the time of the phoney war. Everyone thought that it would be over by Christmas but then Pete was called up. Jill's father died when she was small and Pete had been the father-figure in her life, but she put everything into caring for the tiger she called Ronny after his elderly predecessor. He needed medicine and care but still only grew painfully slowly. Then everything went wrong. The war became real with regular bombing raids, Pete was ''missing in action'' in Norway (Mum was in little doubt about what ''that'' meant) and Jill was ordered to be evacuated to the country. What would happen to Ronny when the threat of being shot hung over the animals? And more importantly, what could Jill do about it?
I thought this book would make me cry. It didn, but it'ts not that sort of book at all. Jill is as feisty a heroine as you can imagine and she brooks no nonsense from zoo directors or anyone else who might stand in her (or Ronny's) way. You can't help but warm to her as she tries to make the best of the problems which life deals her – and some of them are very unfair. Ronny the tiger cub is a wonderfully-observed character too and we see him develop from the sickly cub with soft fur and paws which seem outrageously large for his body into the mature animal needing his own space and who would be capable of killing a man. As Jill's fight to ensure Ronny's survival reaches its crescendo I didn't cry – but I certainly had to remind myself to breathe on a couple of occasions. It's real edge-of-the-seat stuff and I didn't see how it could work out.
There's a neat blend of fact and fiction in the story. Tough decisions had to be made about animals at the zoo and there were a couple of escapees from the complex during a bombing raid. Children were evacuated to the country with, er, variable benefits and Antony Wootten neatly knits all this together into a good story.
