The Menagerie

This fantasy novel follows twelve-year-old Logan Wilde, who recently moved from Chicago to the small town of Xanadu, Wyoming, after his mother abandoned the family via postcard. His father quit his law job and relocated them, ostensibly to search for her. Logan has spent four months at his new school without making real friends.

One morning, Logan wakes to find enormous golden feathers scattered across his bedroom carpet. On his way to school, he notices the front door of the local bank has been shredded and nearly crashes his bike into three classmates: Zoe Kahn, a perpetually anxious girl; Blue Merevy, an easygoing boy; and Keiko, a sharp-tempered sixth grader. Zoe tells Logan her "dog" is missing, and Logan volunteers to help by scouting the school cafeteria, where he learns something broke in overnight and devoured all the food, leaving behind red feathers.

After school, Logan discovers a lion's tail protruding from under his bed. The creature turns out to be a griffin cub, part eagle and part lion, who communicates with Logan telepathically. Logan names him Squorp after the sound the cub makes when he burps. Squorp reveals he escaped from the Menagerie, a secret facility where his family lives alongside dragons and other mythical creatures. A bossy sister named Clink organized the escape, promising treasure in the outside world. Logan decides to return Squorp and asks the cub to show him the way in.

Squorp leads Logan through a gap cut in a grate beneath the Menagerie's perimeter wall. Inside, Logan discovers a sprawling compound with a griffin enclosure, an Aviary dome, a lake, and scorched terrain near dragon dens. He overhears Zoe's father, Mr. Kahn, and Melissa, Blue's mother and the Menagerie's administrator, discussing the escape; they suspect Zoe left the enclosure gate unlocked. An intruder alarm blares, and Logan hides in the unicorn stable, where he meets Cleopatra and Charlemagne, two haughty, talking unicorns. A hellhound corners him before Zoe arrives and is astonished to find a stranger holding a griffin cub.

When Logan proves he can communicate telepathically with the cubs, a bond Zoe insists should be impossible at their age of four months, she cautiously accepts his presence. She explains that her family has cared for the Menagerie for generations, descended from Kublai Khan. She describes SNAPA, the SuperNatural Animal Protection Agency, which oversees all menageries worldwide. SNAPA recently inspected the Menagerie and left a long list of required fixes, with a reinspection on Sunday. Mr. Kahn allows Logan to stay and help, recognizing that his bond with the cubs makes him uniquely useful.

Logan tours the grounds and meets Pelly, a giant goose who lays golden eggs; Nero, a phoenix who regenerates from his own ashes; Captain Fuzzbutt, a woolly mammoth; and Mooncrusher, a yeti groundskeeper. He learns that Blue is a merman and that Zoe's older brother Matthew has Tracker training, the Menagerie's term for agents who locate and retrieve mythical creatures.

That evening, Logan, Zoe, and Blue hide in the public library after hours to search for a second cub. Logan finds Flurp, a dark-gray female who loves stories, nestled among Harry Potter books in the Storytime Room. As they escape, a mysterious figure circles the building with a flashlight. Zoe fears it may be an "exterminator," someone SNAPA sends to kill escaped creatures. They flee with Flurp.

Back at the Menagerie, the Kahns bring in Clink, captured at the bank. The aggressive cub breaks free and rampages, demanding her confiscated treasure. Logan calms her by offering his mother's gold charm bracelet, the most precious thing he owns. Clink pledges to guard it. During dinner, Melissa reveals that SNAPA policy now calls for terminating escaped creatures on sight, meaning the missing cubs could be killed if discovered.

Shaken by this revelation and by warnings from her older sister Ruby, Zoe slips kraken ink, a substance that erases supernatural memories, into Logan's iced tea. Blue knocks the glass away before Logan can drink and explains that memory wiping is standard policy for outsiders. The last person they trusted, Jasmin Sterling's brother Jonathan, dated Ruby for nearly a year before attempting to steal a jackalope, a horned rabbit, from the Menagerie. The Kahns wiped Jonathan's memory, erasing his relationship with Ruby entirely, and Zoe was forced to end her friendship with Jasmin. Logan is hurt but agrees to stay overnight.

The next morning, Logan wanders to the lake and climbs onto what appears to be an ordinary horse. The creature is the kelpie, a malevolent water-horse that dives immediately, magically binding Logan to its back to drown him. Captain Fuzzbutt alerts Zoe, who dives in. The kraken, thought to be hibernating, intervenes and forces the kelpie to release Logan. He survives after CPR.

Over the next day, the group recovers two more cubs. Logan finds Clonk, a brown male who idolizes Clink, hiding in a toy store and clutching fake pirate gold. They also overhear Miss Sameera, the school librarian, on the phone telling someone she followed a Tracker to Xanadu and has spotted griffin cubs, marking her as a threat to the Menagerie. Later, Logan lures the food-obsessed red cub, whom he names Yump, to a park grill with cheeseburgers. Matthew tranquilizes the panicking cub.

With five of six cubs recovered, Logan and Zoe review security footage from the enclosure. The tape shows that Nira, the mother griffin, slept through the night and did not unlock the gate. At around two a.m., Clink looks toward the gate as if hearing something, then wakes her siblings and leads them out. The footage also captures the last missing cub, a small gray female, burying something before following. Logan and Zoe dig it up and find a friendship bracelet Jasmin once made for Zoe. Zoe realizes the cub has gone to the Sterling mansion, drawn by Zoe's bedtime stories about the house's hidden rooms.

Zoe, Logan, and Blue infiltrate the mansion through secret passageways Zoe knows from childhood sleepovers. Logan finds the gray cub, who has named herself Sage, hiding in a trunk. They become trapped when Logan's father arrives for a meeting with Mr. Sterling about land development. Hiding in a stairwell between the walls, Zoe reveals the truth: Logan's mother, known as Abigail Hardy, is a renowned Tracker who disappeared while transporting a Chinese dragon to the Kahns. Most believe she stole it, but Zoe believes something happened to her. Logan connects a SNAPA agent named Edmund Runcible to a man who visited their Chicago apartment asking accusatory questions about his mother.

The next morning, Blue texts that the SNAPA agents have arrived five hours early. Blue distracts Jasmin while Logan and Zoe escape with Sage. They deliver the cub to the enclosure, where Keiko, revealed to be a kitsune, a Japanese shape-shifting fox spirit, has been disguised as a sixth cub to fool the agents. Mr. Kahn introduces Logan to agents Runcible and Delia Dantes as a new employee, and all six cubs are confirmed safe.

Logan solves the final mystery: The unicorns, resentful about being relocated to make room for the cubs, unbolted the gate during their nightly gallop, hoping the cubs would leave so they could reclaim their space. But as the inspection continues into the Aviary, birds begin shrieking. Logan and Zoe rush in and find Pelly's nest soaked in blood, her feathers scattered. Someone has killed the golden-egg-laying goose during the inspection. The novel ends on this cliffhanger, with the killer's identity unknown, the mystery of Logan's mother unresolved, and the threat of Miss Sameera still looming.