Zadie started demanding “more zoo books” when we got home from a day at San Francisco Zoo last weekend. After we read the two zoo books we had at home (“Goodnight Gorilla” and “Put Me in the Zoo”) about a dozen times, we headed to the library for more. As anyone who has visited a library with a toddler in tow knows, trying to find a book about a specific topic can be like trying to sing one song while listening to another through headphones. So I was especially pleased that the one zoo book I managed to find during our visit was a wonderful one.
The illustrations in “Welcome to the Zoo” are all two-page spreads of the type of zoo that we all wish we could visit: where giraffes sneak licks of your ice cream cone when you’re not looking, gorillas sit on benches, reading the paper as you walk by, and you have to watch out for penguins sliding across your path on their way to lunch. It’s a fanciful book where the animals and people do both ordinary and extraordinary things. The pictures are warm and bright, done with oil paint and a crackling varnish that gives them an old fashioned feel. There are no words (a quality I love in a book), but amid the chaos at the zoo there are stories hidden within the pictures. Sometimes we tell the little stories, other times we do more of an “I Spy…” kind of thing. The endpapers have hints of more things to look for.
It’s a funny thing, watching a kid reconcile the images of animals she has only seen in books with the real things at the zoo. A monkey in a book incites squeals of joy and cries of “swing! ape! greela!” But real life gorillas, even ones with tiny little babies in tow, were of no interest. Watching a grizzly bear catching and eating a live fish? Ho hum at the time, but a story we tell over and over again now, partly because the grizzlies in “Welcome to the Zoo” are also eating fish. And thanks to the zoo visit she now realizes that animals eat real fish, not goldfish crackers. Perhaps some food chain friends are in our future.
Tags: 12 months +, animals
