Calling All Animal Lovers: Read Our Review of The School for Talking Pets by Kelli Anne Hawkins, illustrated by Beth Harvey

Pets? Tick! TALKING pets? Double tick! Silly spies, secret plots and one shy kid who might just save the day? Tick, tick, tick! Anything’s possible at the School for Talking Pets…

When Rusty Mulligan and his pet blue-tongued lizard win a week on a secret island at Miss Alice Einstein’s School for Talking Pets, the shy twelve-year-old is thrilled. His best friend will learn to talk!

But once on the island, things don’t go to plan. Rusty must work with the other competition winners, a terrifyingly tattooed gardener, and a multitude of clever animals to save the school from the clutches of the two secret agents who have come to shut it down – by any means necessary.

Doctor Dolittle meets Willy Wonka in this funny and thrilling adventure from exciting new voice Kelli Anne Hawkins. Hawkins’ love of books, libraries, reading and daydreaming told her she was meant to write books. The School for Talking Pets is her middle-grade debut.

As any animal lover would know, the ability to speak the same language as your pet is the ultimate dream; I wish a school like this really did exist! The beauty of this story, however, is its ability to give you a variety of ways you can imagine your own pet talking: its accent, voice, and tone. It’s gripping and exciting.

Rusty is insecure with low confidence in himself – at some point, we’ve all felt like this. Rusty’s character growth over the course of the novel shows that change can happen when you least expect it. Hawkins demonstrates this through learning. Rusty encounters obstacles to his development and growth while at the school, but his ability to push through and recognize his confidence and abilities shows that learning can be interesting and fun—whether that’s personal or institutional.

The School for Talking Pets is a fun, important, and ideal read for children aged 8+. It’s a unique story that has familiar elements of the underdog winning a competition, like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory­, mixed in with the unlikely hero growing into his shell and saving the day.