The Leopard Is Loose: A novel Audiobook

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.

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"Inspired by an actual incident, this mostly sweet-tempered tale [about] a wild cat on the loose in 1950’s Oklahoma City crystallizes a boy’s coming-or-age [in] a transitional time for his family. His father, a test pilot, has died; his mother is getting serious with a new man; and his two uncles are World War II veterans whose PTSD manifests itself in confusing ways . . . In  scenes that put anti-Black discrimination on display, he exposes the persistence of casual racism and how easily it descends into violence . . . Harrigan has a knack for grand-scale historical writing . . . and he engagingly inhabits his young hero’s mind [in] a likable, nostalgic yarn that explores how minor incidents can catalyze into bigger crises."

— Kirkus Reviews“Deeply felt . . . plenty of heart. . . . Harrigan makes a welcome return to fiction with a story inspired by a leopard that escaped from the Oklahoma City Zoo in 1952. . . . Five-year-old Grady is an appealing narrator . . . and Harrigan elegantly conveys the strength of family bonds.