Good Morning Gorillas

Good Morning Gorillas by Mary Pope Osborne takes 7 year olds up into an African cloud forest, where the only way to make a friend is without words.

What happens

It is five in the morning and raining. Annie wakes Jack up anyway. Morgan has left them a new rhyme, and this one says to speak a special language and talk with your hands and your heart.

The book on the tree house floor is about an African rain forest. Annie wishes them there before Jack has finished worrying about vampire bats.

What they get is a cloud forest, so high up that it sits inside the cloud. Mossy trees. Fine drizzle. A fat branch that Annie decides looks like an armchair.

Then a small shaggy head pokes out of the leaves and says "Bu, bu". Annie says "Peekaboo". The gorilla claps her hands and sticks out her tongue, and that is that, they are friends, and Annie has named her Bu-bu before Jack can stop her.

Jack wants to write things down like a proper scientist. Annie wants to climb trees and nibble bark and screech. Your reader will know instantly which one of them they are.

It does not stay cosy. Annie copies Bu-bu swinging between branches and falls, hard, and lies on the ground getting her breath back. Then the rain comes and Jack goes off to fetch the umbrella and cannot find his way back. He spends the whole night alone in a dark, wet forest, jumping at every cracked branch and wondering whether leopards come out after dark.

That stretch is genuinely lonely to read. It is not gory and Bu-bu comes for him at dawn, but a child who does not like being separated from people may find those few pages long.

The pay-off is worth it. Jack ends up standing in a clearing full of sleeping mountain gorillas with a huge silverback opening his eyes at him, remembering the phrase "shy and gentle giants" and hoping very much that his book is right.

There are proper facts tucked in about what gorillas eat and how a family works, handled lightly, never as a lesson.

What to read next

If your reader liked the idea of finding a magic that is not spells, Thanksgiving on Thursday is the next of these journeys, and the special thing there is a very long table and a lot of cooking.