The Leopard Is Loose: A novel

Synopsis: The fragile, 1952 postwar tranquility of a five-year-old boy's world explodes one summer day when a leopard escapes from the zoo, throwing all of Oklahoma City 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 sees 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 the 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--the still-incomprehensible threats of battle fatigue, alcoholism, grief, Jim Crow laws, and, most imminently, the dangerous cat itself. The Leopard Is Loose is a stunning encapsulation of America in the 1950s, and a moving portrait of a young boy's struggle to find his place in his family's, and his nation's, history.