Penguin Pandemonium – The Wild Beast

Penguin Pandemonium - The Wild Beast by Jeanne Willis is a funny animal story for 6 year olds, set in a zoo where nobody is looking at the penguins any more.

What happens

Nobody is coming to see the penguins at City Zoo any more. Rory the rockhopper has spent all morning practising a new belly-sliding stunt with his mates and there is nobody there to watch it.

He decides the Penguin Cam must be broken. So he jumps up and down underneath it shouting is anybody out there, why don't you love me any more. His best friend Blue says it looks like a toilet dance.

Then the two brown bears in the paddock above let slip the real reason. Something new has arrived in the enclosure below theirs. The queue for it is enormous. Nobody knows what it is.

Muriel, who is bossy and believes the world should be looking at her, decides to fix this. Her plan involves the viewing grille, her tail and a large crowd of visitors standing directly underneath.

It does not go well. The keeper assumes the penguins have upset tummies and doses all the fish with medicine, so everybody's tea is ruined. Big Paulie the emperor penguin is so cross he cancels a surprise nobody ever gets to find out about.

The jokes are pitched exactly right for six. Penguins say oh my cod and don't be squidiculous. A bear mentions tinkling the ivories and Rory is appalled and tells him to go behind a bush like everyone else. There's a song about whether the new beast is a hippophant or a rhinoceroo.

Underneath all the silliness, it's about something every child knows about. Somebody else is getting all the attention, and it stings. Muriel keeps making it worse and then blaming Hatty and Brenda, who go along with her while very obviously wishing they hadn't.

If you've got a reader just managing short chapters on their own, this is a nice length for that. It's also a good one to read out loud, because almost every character needs a different voice.

Nothing in it will upset anybody. The only thing worth knowing is that the pooping chapter is quite detailed, and your reader will absolutely want to tell you about it. Probably at dinner.

What to read next

One more thing. This is the third of Rory's books. It stands up perfectly well on its own, but if your reader takes to him, the first Penguin Pandemonium is here too. That's where the Penguin Cam arrives in the first place, and where Rory is still doing his back flip with a triple somersault to a zoo that has stopped turning up.