On her 11th birthday, Marnie McBride goes to a junk shop with her father to pick out a present. There, the mysterious shopkeeper eagerly gifts her a shoebox containing four animal figurines, all of whom have the ability to magically spring to life. Marnie now has to deal with the struggles of balancing her life between adventuring with the collectively named “Shoebox Zoo” animals on a quest to find an ancient book of magic, and her day-to-day life as a schoolgirl, on top of having to deal with the grief stemming from the loss of her recently deceased mother.