The Zookeeper's Sleepers

Krystyna Higgins is the former book review editor for the Catholic New
Times.

The Bungalo partners have launched a new series of books for the
youngest of beginning readers. Using a cast of delightfully goofy animal
characters and minimal vocabulary, each of the stories poses a small
problem, which is resolved in a neat “twist” at the end.

In Peek-a-boo, a bus driver travels through the zoo asking,
“Peek-a-boo. Where are you?” Various groups of animals in turn
respond, “Look again. We are here.” After disappearing once again,
they are all discovered hiding in the bus.

In Downtown Lost and Found, the same animals complain “We are
lost.” The security clerk tells them to “[w]ait in here and you will
be found”—and found they are, in a joyful reunion with their keeper.


The Zookeeper’s Sleepers finds the same keeper lending bedtime
stories to each of the animals when they tell her, “We are awake. We
cannot sleep.” When they point out to her that “we cannot read,”
she reads to them—and ends up with insomnia herself.

The layout of each book follows the same format. They all begin with a
page of labeled pictures that both sets the scene and provides
additional words for keen early readers to tackle. The “problem” is
posed in a single line of text per page and the response is found by
turning the page; the pattern is repeated a total of four times before
the final resolution. Though the text is minimal, the cumulative
patterning will lead young readers forward to find out what happens, and
the final scene inevitably inspires a chuckle.

Bianchi’s drawings are eye-catching in both color and texture (one
can practically feel the snake’s scales or the elephant’s blue
hide). They also reflect the text’s humor, such as when the clerk and
his monkey helper strain to shove a too-big elephant through a too-small
doorway.

These cleverly constructed and whimsical little stories cannot help but
entice a child to try to read them. Highly recommended.