ARMANDO AND THE AMAZING ANIMAL RACE

A 12-year-old boy travels the world on a mission to document endangered species in Schaffter’s middle-grade adventure.

Armando Garduño, nicknamed “Armando Armadillo” by his friend Jinny because of his shy nature, is spending the summer in London with his eccentric grandmother Granny D while his father fights an oil spill in British Columbia. Armando and Granny D are meant to be VIPs at the launch of the newest edition of the Amazing Animal Race, a globe-trotting photography contest, but instead they go rogue and sign up to join the game without Armando’s father’s knowledge (his mother disappeared while participating in the race when the boy was only 4). The duo travels across seven countries in 70 days to photograph endangered species while battling contestants like the villainous Max McCoy and the suspicious Professor Higginbottom. The excitement of retracing his mother’s footsteps sweeps Armando off his feet, but he remains anxious from the outset. (“Did I just join a perilous, seventy-day race around the world with a wacky grandmother I hardly knew?”) The fast-paced narrative takes Armando and Granny D from a dangerous encounter with a mama polar bear in Greenland to a hot air balloon accident in Kenya to an emotionally poignant experience in Brazil as Armando learns to stand up for himself and what he believes in, be it the importance of his mother’s legacy or the value of protecting endangered animals all over the world. In her debut middle-grade novel, Schaffter delivers an exciting international adventure for young environmentalists and conservationists. The book acknowledges problems with its own conceit—Armando points out that the race means added airplane emissions in the atmosphere, which can harm the very animals he’s trying to save—and models how activists can always push to do more. Snippets from Armando’s mother’s journal, accompanied by many line drawings and maps by illustrators Morales, Didkova, and Robinson, effectively communicate zoological facts in media res.

A whirlwind of an environmentally minded tale with lessons about both animals and people.