I used to think that children’s books without words would be a total nightmare…the pressure of having to come up with an interesting story myself each night, no thank you! Surely that’s like buying a blank CD!. But ‘Welcome to the Zoo‘ obviously caught Santa’s eye because it arrived under our tree this Christmas with Mr Moo’s name on it and I love it (Santa will be pleased to hear that Mr Moo adores it too!). Ironically, its hard to put what Alison Jay’s book does into words but here goes:
The beautifully illustrated pictures track a family’s route through a very unusual zoo where the animals roam freely and get into all kinds of mischief.
The pictures below will give you a taste of the fantastic illustrations, there is just so much to look at you could spend a whole story time just looking at one page. You can focus on the family (which Mr Moo has decided represent us…though he did express some surprise that at just seven months, Lollipop was able to walk around the zoo ‘all by herself’!) as they make their way around the zoo but there are so many other things to do on each page. For example, you can track one beleaguered zoo keeper as he tries in vain to capture a delinquent ostrich or you can follow the movements of a rogue parrot-shaped balloon which gets separated from its young owner in the early pages but, through the intervention of a goose, is ultimately reunited with him. If you run out of your own ideas, the last page contains several suggestions for things to look out for.
This really is a lovely book. One word of warning though, if you aren’t David Attenborough then I would suggest working on your animal identification skills to avoid a very awkward silence when your child asks “What’s that animal, mammy?”.
We have the hard-backed version which comes in at £9.89 but the board-book version is just £3.73. Alison Jay has also published several other books and I will definitely be checking them out.
