Perfectly Peculiar Pets

Elli Woollard's Perfectly Peculiar Pets is a funny A to Z of poems for 5 year olds about the animals you'd never be allowed to keep.

What happens

The idea is simple. Puppies and tabby cats are fine, but why not get a pet that makes your parents faint? So each letter brings a new one, and each one turns out to be surprisingly useful.

The elephant's trunk is a brilliant hoover. The crocodile saves you ever needing scissors. The rhino's horn makes a handy clothes hook (she's basically a wardrobe on four legs). And the zebra? She stamps her feet and becomes a zebra crossing.

Some of them are just lovely. There's a grandpa who goes to bingo on a Saturday night with a flamingo, and they dance the flamenco too. Some are sneaky. The gorilla clears out the ice-cream shop so you get your ice creams free!

And some are properly gross, which is going to go down VERY well with a certain kind of five-year-old. N is for Nits (come here, have some!). The slug poem asks whether you'd snuggle six slugs in your duvet. The vulture loves opera but also eats long-dead mice that are green and forgotten.

The rhymes are super bouncy and made for reading aloud. You'll probably find yourselves chanting the jackal one ("his snack'll be you") and the platypus one, which is a big list of silly rhymes on "-attypus". X is a lovely surprise too. Nobody knows what it is, so it's just called X.

A few poems come with little starred notes that sneak in real facts. Killer whales are actually a kind of dolphin. Quokkas aren't giant rats at all.

At the end, the poet talks straight to your reader about writing poems of their own. First you stand on your head and wiggle your nose (well, not really). Then she shows them how she played with the sounds of "bison" and "basin", and where the beats land in the elephant poem. It's a very friendly way in if you've got a child who likes making up rhymes.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who giggles at anything slimy or smelly, this is one to share at bedtime. If the rhyming goes down well, Elli Woollard's The Secret Pirate is a longer story told in rhyme, about a schoolgirl who spends her weekends fighting monsters at sea.