Amelia Bedelia Goes Wild!

Herman Parish's Amelia Bedelia Goes Wild is a funny chapter book for 6 year olds about a girl who builds a zoo in her own back garden.

What happens

Amelia Bedelia is in bed with flu. She's sick of her bedroom, sick of nature programmes and most of all sick of being sick. Her whole class has gone to the zoo without her.

And while they're there, a monkey escapes! Could anything be more unfair?

The one good thing about being ill is a TV show about monkeys. She learns their trick for peeling a banana from the bottom, and it actually works.

That night, hot with fever, she dreams the garden is full of animals and her class come round to see them. By the morning she has a Big Idea. She's going to build a zoo in the back garden.

This is the fourth Amelia Bedelia chapter book, and it's a busy one. Her classmates turn up with their pets. Angel brings a ball python called Squeezer. Penny brings a white mouse called Oswald, who promptly goes missing (and everyone looks at the snake).

At school their teacher Mrs. Shauk, known as the Hawk, sees everything. So the class invent a warning signal. Whoever spots her coming says "Beep!" It doesn't save Amelia Bedelia from being caught passing a note.

The jokes come from grown-up sayings taken word for word. Mrs. Shauk says no reading aloud and Amelia Bedelia hears "allowed". When Mrs. Shauk calls the zoo plan "pie in the sky", Amelia Bedelia wants to know how a pie stays up there.

Meanwhile somebody keeps eating bananas in the garden, peeled the monkey way. Your reader will probably be bursting to say who long before the grown-ups catch on (Dad keeps joking that Amelia Bedelia IS the missing monkey).

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Roger's pet gecko, Georgie, died months before the story starts. He was squashed under a sofa cushion and the family kept him in the freezer until the ground thawed. Georgie ends up as an exhibit, frozen in a block of ice, and there's a little funeral for him in the garden.

It's done gently and with lots of warmth, and Dad finding a frozen gecko when he's hunting for ice cream is very funny. But if your reader has just lost a pet, it might land harder than the rest.

What to read next

For more of the same classmates, try Amelia Bedelia Shapes Up. Penny, Holly and Dawn are all back, and a kickball game at break goes badly wrong when Dawn would rather have the water fountain on her team.