Here’s Hank – How to Hug an Elephant

Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver's How to Hug an Elephant is a zoo trip story for 6 year olds about a boy who cannot read a map.

What happens

Hank's class has been looking forward to this outing all week. Then he gets Nick McKelty for a partner, which means sharing a bus seat with a boy who calls him Zipper Fang.

Their teacher has one rule. No wandering away. She says it to everyone and then says it again, just for Hank.

He's in trouble within minutes (he was trying to be helpful, and nobody believes him).

Then McKelty slips out of the bathroom and leaves him there. Hank finds the big zoo map in its glass case and traces every trail with his finger. Every single one has a snack bar on it.

That's the fun of this book. You get everything going on inside Hank's head, and there's a lot going on. He asks a couple with cameras for directions and manages to pick the only two people in the whole zoo who don't speak English. He reads a zookeeper's Wild About Giraffes T-shirt as Wild About Gingerbread and says so out loud.

He isn't embarrassed by any of it. He just moves on to the next idea.

The zookeeper is Nora, and she's off to check on Elsie, an elephant who arrived yesterday and is being kept on her own until she settles in. Hank is told to wait by the gate. You can probably guess what he does instead.

If you've got a child who finds reading hard, Hank says so about himself more than once and it's never the punchline. He can't tell left from right. He isn't much of a reader. Nora tells him she wasn't either at his age, and it didn't stop her doing the job she loves.

One thing to flag. Elsie was badly treated at a circus before the zoo rescued her. Hank is told about it rather than shown it, and it's the reason he's so set on being kind to her, but a very tender child might want to talk about it afterwards.

It's an American book, so there's a field trip, a bathroom and dollars in a piggy bank. Nothing a new reader will trip over.

What to read next

If Hank's company goes down well, there's a whole shelf of him. A Short Tale About a Long Dog is the one where he finally talks his dad into a trip to the animal shelter, and the price is getting every one of his grades up first.