Zoo house by Heath McKenzie
Scholastic, 2018. ISBN 9781742767628
(Age: 4+) Highly recommended. Themes: Zoos, Animals, Housework,
Humour. When Oscar gets out of bed in the morning, he steps upon a
snake. Undeterred he goes to the loo where he finds a gorilla or
two, but on the stairs is a pair of brown bears. In the kitchen he
finds baboons and chimps, while the bathroom is crammed with an
elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. What is going on, children
will ask, but turning the page the reader will find a frazzled mum
trying to keep the housework up to scratch with all these visitors.
McKenzie presents a dilemma in this uproariously funny verse story
of how a house becomes a zoo, and how mum tries to turn things
around so that everyone helps with the chores. She calls a halt to
doing all the work herself, and writes up a chart with everyone's
name on it and the chore they must do. Each animal is quite prepared
to help, but the results are not quite what everyone expected.
Children will laugh out loud at the things the animals do in the
house and their attempts at doing housework. Small moments of humour
abound an readers will love following the antics of each, watching
how the other children and dad behave along the way. Among the funny
digitally executed illustrations, full of movement and humour, eager
readers will find eleven koalas hidden within the pages.
All children will have great fun with this book, recognising the
various animals and their incarnation within the pages, predicting
the rhyme on each page, following the antics of each animal and
checking out all the chores that are needed to keep a house going.
The funny illustrations beg to be pored over and some readers may
try their own hand at drawing an animal in the McKenzie style. I
loved the endpapers with their paw prints, adding another level of
research for readers, working out which print belongs to which
animal.
Fran Knight