Zoe’s Rescue Zoo 16 – The Super Sloth

Amelia Cobb's The Super Sloth is a Zoe's Rescue Zoo story for 5 year olds about a new arrival who isn't behaving the way a sloth should.

What happens

Zoe lives at the Rescue Zoo with her mum, the zoo vet, and a mouse lemur called Meep who sleeps on the end of her bed. She wears a silver paw-print pendant that opens every enclosure, and she has a secret nobody else knows. She understands every word the animals say, and they understand her.

The big news this week is the Rainforest Dome. It's a huge glass bowl out in the field behind the zoo, hot and steamy inside, with parakeets swooping through the palm trees and tamarins with long white moustaches leaping about across the stream. It opens on Saturday and Zoe has been helping get it ready after school.

Then Great-Uncle Horace comes roaring up on his motorbike weeks early, a crate in the sidecar. Inside it is Sabina, a three-toed sloth from Costa Rica, about a year old, warm and soft and smiling in her sleep.

Zoe has about a hundred questions for her. The trouble is that sloths sleep for fifteen to twenty hours a day, and when Sabina is awake she talks so slowly that Zoe can only catch the odd word. Something beginning with y. Something that sounds like day.

And Sabina keeps turning up asleep on the ground by the anteater's hollow stump, instead of in the lovely palm tree Zoe chose for her.

Meanwhile there's a school project on plants that Zoe hasn't started, a sneeze she's pretending isn't a cold, and a zoo manager called Mr Pinch who thinks a sloth that sleeps all day sounds rather lazy.

The animal facts are folded in so naturally that your reader will come away knowing a fair bit without noticing. Why sloths don't fall out of trees in their sleep. What humidity means. Why a rainforest needs rain even indoors.

One thing to know. Sabina is at the zoo because hunters killed her mother before she'd learned to survive in the wild, and the book says so plainly in chapter two. It's handled gently, and Zoe tells her she's safe now, but a five-year-old who worries about animals may want you close by for that page.

What to read next

If the sloth is a hit, there's another new arrival at the Rescue Zoo who has everybody stumped. The Puzzled Penguin turns up looking perfectly sweet and behaving not at all like a penguin.