The Magical Animal Adoption Agency
Working retail and taking care of unicorns
One of the reasons I wanted to start this newsletter was to highlight books that seem to have flown under the radar for most. I don’t remember how I discovered this one, but I think it was just through picking up the first one at the library, hastily flipping through to see if it seemed good and had enough pictures, and adding it to our stack.
This method doesn’t work every time, but it turns up the occasional hidden gem. Such as…
The Series: The Magical Animal Adoption Agency
The Author: Kallie George
The Illustrator: Alexandra Boiger
Length/Picture Density: Around 150 pages, pictures on most spreads
The premise: A girl, Clover, ends up getting a job at a magical animal adoption agency in some magical woods that happen to be walking distance from her home. The owner of said agency, Mr. Jams, is good at his job, but is regularly pulled away for tasks that require Clover to run the agency on her own.
The review: What makes these books unique is in how engaging they are despite weighing sub plots as much or more than their main plots. They actually feel rather like adult life dramatized into a children’s fairy tale. Yes, you have your main thing or two going on in life, but there are also hobbies, obligations, interests, daily and weekly chores, happenstance encounters, etc. In Clover’s case, those day-to-day responsibilities include taking care of unicorns, finding appropriate adoptees for magical beings, and checking up on past adoption pairs. And most of all, customer service.
The customers run a range that will be familiar to anyone who has worked in retail. There are friendly and supportive ones, difficult ones, ones with challenging and specific demands, sometimes with a companion who tries to mitigate.
One thing that helps the books tick along is that the animal maintenance parts are pretty fun. All the details, like the needs of fire salamanders and the dietary habits of pixie horses all feel believable in the way certain fantasy stories make up rules that are easy to accept.
That said, they can require a little more patience than most chapter books. The tension doesn’t slam into you with a major turn at the end of the first chapter, it layers on steadily.
Clover has to keep the whole thing a secret, even from her parents and best friend, but the books avoid making that a major point of tension: Her friend is away at another camp and her parents, loving as they are, are so busy they have no real idea what their daughter is up to. It’s one of those situations that if the book focused on it more, you would realize how neglectful they are (kind of like Dumbledore regularly letting his students risk their lives), but it keeps them from getting in the way of the plot, so I was always relieved when they fail to even begin to figure out what’s going on. Actually, the only part of these books that doesn’t feel believable is that no other non-magical people stumble on the adoption agency, despite the fact that Clover finds it without trying to.
The third book in the series, The Missing Magic, is good, and introduces some interpersonal tension that is absent from the first two, but I enjoyed it a little less. The main reason is that I figured out the key plot point midway through, but to keep the book going, Clover has to keep not getting it. Kind of frustrating, but it does help the tension build.
The end of the third sets up a fourth story, but…there is none. Jarring in a world where so many series have a dozen or more volumes, especially given that the last one came out in 2016.
That said, you can have a similar experience with the Heartwood Hotel series, also by Kallie George, which has many of the same elements, but swaps out magical animals for talking animals (the protagonist is a mouse).
You can also check out the agency’s website. Not the website for the book series (okay, it does mention the books), the site for the actual magical adoption agency.