Gwen the Rescue Hen

Winner of the 2020 Northern Lights Book Award Honoring Children’s Literature of Exceptional Merit

PACKED with 22 fun facts about chickens!

Gwen the Rescue Hen is the heart-warming story of a quick-witted chicken who discovers the joy of being a hen after she’s sprung from an egg-laying farm, and finds her way to a boy named Mateo.

Gwen has spent her whole life in a big egg-laying hen house, so she knows very little about what chickens can do (besides lay eggs, of course). A fateful tornado turns her world upside-down and sideways, landing her in a strange new place that’s nothing like the hen house.

Using her wits and chicken superpowers, Gwen dodges danger at every turn until she finds safety and friendship with a boy named Mateo. Together they discover how extraordinary an ordinary chicken really is.

The book includes a bonus section called More About Chickens, where curious readers can learn that chickens have extraordinary eyesight, a complex language of 24 sounds, and are descended from dinosaurs, among other fun facts about chickens.

Leslie Crawford is a veteran journalist who lives in San Francisco with her two children, six chickens, and four pigeons. She has published two children's books, Sprig the Rescue Pig and Gwen the Rescue Hen, and has written extensively about children and childhood development. Sonja Stangl is an artist and illustrator from Austria. She studied multimedia art in Salzburg and now lives and works in Vienna, where she happily illustrates stories for books and animation.