Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood
by Robert Beatty
Disney Hyperion, October 8, 2024. 314 pages.
Review written June 26, 2024, from an Advance Reader Copy sent by the publisher.
Starred Review
Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood is about a girl who’s grown up in an institution that insists it’s not an orphanage. Kids are supposed to get placed in homes, but every time Sylvia gets placed somewhere, she runs away to come back. She loves the horses there and helps the stable manager care for them.
And when a 100-year flood hits – the horses need help getting to the higher pasture. Sylvia and her own horse Kitty Hawk work heroically to save them. But along the way, Sylvia also saves a boy – a boy who says strange things. And they see impossible animals coming down the river – like a jaguar mother with her cub.
It becomes an adventure of figuring out what’s going on with the river, where these out-of-place people and things are coming from, and how to make things right – including with Sylvia herself.
It’s all told in an engaging way, with characters it’s a delight to spend time with. I loved Sylvia’s love for the natural world and the pictures from her notebook as she draws the animals she sees, even the ones that are out of place. This is an adventure story firmly set in the natural world – with a speculative fiction twist.
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