By Rudyard Kipling
The original Mowgli stories: a boy raised by a wolf pack, taught by a bear and a panther, and hunted the whole way by the tiger Shere Khan.
Your child probably knows the cartoon. Kipling's version is older and stranger, closer to a legend told around a fire. A human baby crawls into a wolves' den one night, and the pack raises him as their own. Baloo, a big sleepy bear, teaches him the Law of the Jungle, and Bagheera, a black panther, keeps him alive. But Shere Khan, a tiger with a bad leg, has wanted this 'man-cub' dead from the start, and most of Mowgli's story is that long hunt: snatched away by the wild monkeys, rescued by Kaa the python, cast out by wolves and villagers alike, and finally turning the tables to kill Shere Khan himself. The rest of the book is other tales, and the one everyone remembers is 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,' about a mongoose who fights two cobras to save the family that took him in.
This one's for the older animal-lover who wants some danger and grandeur with their creatures, not the soft, singing kind. Kipling's jungle runs on rank and law and real menace, and Mowgli is a genuinely wild hero. Get the illustrated hardcover of the actual stories, not a picture-book spun off the movie; that's the version worth keeping on a shelf. Two things to know going in. The prose is rich, formal Victorian English that reads best aloud or to a confident reader. And the book's imperial-era outlook comes through in places, which is more a thing to talk about as you go than a reason to skip it.