Debut author C.C. Harrington has felt a strong draw toward animal stories since her childhood in the English countryside. Among her favorite books were Redwall, the Rats of NIMH series, Watership Down, The Animals of Farthing Wood, and Paddington Bear. “If I had to pick one book that I loved as a child that continues to be important in every way,” she says, “it would be Charlotte’s Web.”
Set in 1963, Harrington’s middle grade novel Wildoak (Scholastic Press) follows two viewpoints: those of 11-year-old Maggie Stevens and snow leopard cub Rumpus. When Maggie’s gruff father wants to send her to an institution for “treatment” of her stutter, her mother intercedes, and instead Maggie goes to stay with her grandfather in rural Cornwall. There, animal-loving Maggie discovers Rumpus, who was abandoned in Wildoak Forest after being sold through the Animal Kingdom of London’s Harrods department store. When she realizes that the ancient woods face imminent peril from copper mining, Maggie is challenged to speak up on behalf of both the forest and Rumpus.
The character of Rumpus was inspired by the real story of Christian the lion, who was sold by Harrods to two men in 1969. After the growing lion became a challenge to safely manage in London, he was rehabilitated to the wild in Kenya. Documentary footage from 1971 that depicted Christian joyfully reuniting with his previous caretakers went viral in 2002 and continues to attract viewers today. “That video was definitely something that stayed with me while the seeds of the story started to take root,” Harrington says. “The idea that a human being could forge a truly special bond with a wild creature, without compromising what was in the animal’s best interests.”
Her titular Wildoak Forest has a basis in the Roundwood, an ancient site conserved by the National Trust in the U.K. She describes walking there as “profoundly grounding.” Like her character Maggie, she likes to take off her shoes whenever she can—sometimes to quizzical looks from fellow walkers—but loves the sensation of connectedness to the earth. Her original concept for Wildoak emphasized the forest itself as a character, including illustrated versions of particular events from Wildoak’s perspective. The published book includes ink illustrations by Diana Sudyka that highlight the forest, Rumpus, and other creatures.
Harrington, who now lives in Maryland with her family, studied literature at Oxford University but never believed she could “grow up to be a writer,” she says. That changed in her early 30s, when a writing exercise in an evening class caused her to inexplicably write in the voice of a 12-year-old girl. “I think the act of reading as a child had shaped me in so many ways that it must have stayed with me—filling up that deep well I now draw on for inspiration, whether I was conscious of it or not. Before long that first exercise had turned into the beginnings of a novel, and I kept writing whenever I could.”
Her first manuscript will likely remain trunked, but the second effort is one she still considers dear to her heart. She says she’s “excited to come back to it when the time is right.”
Harrington now has two standalone middle grade novels underway. She describes them as very different from her debut work, but both feature animals and return to central themes of empathy and understanding. In regard to Wildoak, she says, “My hope is always that a reader will take from the story whatever it is they need in that moment.” That might mean that a child who stutters relates to Maggie, or that someone who has never visited an old-growth forest seeks out a “sense of wonder and delight” among the trees.
Most of all, Harrington hopes that the book “nurtures an understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings—animals, humans and plants. And with that sense of interconnectedness, the feeling of belonging.”
