Zoe’s Rescue Zoo 14 – The Giggly Giraffe

Amelia Cobb's The Giggly Giraffe is a warm animal story for 5 year olds about a brand-new baby at the zoo who finds absolutely everything funny.

What happens

Zoe lives inside the Rescue Zoo. Not near it, in it, in a little cottage on the edge, because her mum is the zoo vet and her Great-Uncle Horace built the place for animals who had nowhere else to go.

She also has a secret. She can talk to animals, and nobody knows. Not her mum. Not Horace. (It does mean she gets the credit for being very good at picking names, which she absolutely isn't. She just asks them.)

The book opens on a birth, and it's handled beautifully for this age. Zoe watches four hooves appear, then four spindly legs, and then a whole giraffe on the ground blinking at everyone. He's up and trying to walk within the hour, because a baby giraffe in the wild would have to be.

Zoe names him Jamie. Jamie's legs take him backwards when he means to go forwards, everybody laughs, and Jamie decides that being laughed at is the best thing that has ever happened to him. Which is how the whole zoo ends up awake at six on a Sunday morning.

Then Mr Pinch announces that he has entered the Rescue Zoo for the Best Zoo Award. He wants the shiny gold one, for his office. What he does not want is a giraffe who plays tricks.

It's a gentle book with a proper problem in it. Jamie isn't naughty, he's a baby having fun, and the grown-up who can't see the difference is the one who needs handling. Five-year-olds understand that distinction perfectly well.

There are lovely small things all the way through. Meep the mouse lemur waking from a dream about a banana and having to choose between finishing a real one and finding out what the noise outside is. Giraffe coat patterns being different on every giraffe, like fingerprints. Nothing here will frighten anybody.

Good for reading aloud, and good for a new reader working their way up to chapters alone.

What to read next

There are lots of these and they don't need reading in order. The Puzzled Penguin is an early one in the library, where a very small penguin arrives at the zoo and won't do a single thing the other penguins do, and Zoe is the only one who can ask him why.