Zoey and Sassafras 8 – Bips and Roses

Asia Citro's Bips and Roses is a Zoey and Sassafras adventure for 6 year olds about saving a flower you need a magnifying glass to understand.

What happens

Zoey and her cat Sassafras have a magic doorbell out in the barn. When it rings, a magical animal is outside needing help. Her mum has been doing this her whole life. Zoey gets to do it now too.

This one starts with Pip, a forest frog, pacing up and down and getting his words in a muddle. The hophops have come through.

Hophops are the magical version of grasshoppers, and every few years a huge batch hatches at once and eats everything in its path. This time the path went straight over the forest roses.

The roses are still standing. What's gone are the bips, the tiny green creatures that live on the leaves and make the roses grow. Without bips there are no roses, and a newly hatched hippogriff can't fly until it has eaten a few. Their wings don't work otherwise.

The eggs are due in three days. Maybe four.

So Zoey gets out her Thinking Goggles and her science journal and starts working properly. Three experiments at once, because there isn't time to do them one after another. One thing changed in each. A fourth container left alone so she has something to compare against.

The science here is the real thing, done at a kitchen table, and it's never a lecture. Zoey counts around two hundred bips on a leaf and writes the numbers down. Some of the experiments do nothing at all, which is allowed.

The funny bits are mostly Pip, who can never remember human words and calls a magnifying glass a Looky Thingy. And bips, it turns out, burp light.

It is American, so it's Mom and gray and favorite throughout. There's a glossary at the back explaining lichen and photosynthesis, which is a nice touch if your reader starts asking.

One thing to be ready for. The reason the babies matter so much is that without working wings they can't get away from anything hunting them, and Pip says plainly that most wouldn't last the year. A frog cries about it. It's one short exchange and then everybody gets busy.

This isn't the first of these, and Zoey greets an old friend here as though you've already met him. It still reads perfectly well on its own.

What to read next

For another creature turning up at that barn door, there's Unicorns and Germs, where something enormous arrives in real pain and Zoey has to work out why.