The Leopard Is Loose

The fragile, 1952 post-war 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. Leopard on the 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.