A herd of elephants walks onto a lit football field on a Friday night, in front of a full stand.
That is roughly where the book starts, and the thing worth knowing is that the animals on that field were talking to each other the entire time and not one person in the bleachers heard a syllable of it.
The police call in Teddy Fitzroy and his father to help walk the herd back to the elephant sanctuary they came from. When the count is taken at the other end, one animal is not there. Tanzy, the only African elephant in the group, is still out somewhere. At the same time Teddy's best friend Xavier is accused of wrecking a bulldozer, in protest at a builder who is about to clear a patch of ground the local kids call TurtleTown. Two problems, one boy, and they pull in opposite directions for most of the book.
This is the ninth FunJungle novel.
The science it actually teaches
The elephant material is the reason this one earns its place on our Stealth Science shelf, and it is better than a comic mystery had any obligation to be.
Start with the title, because it is not only a pun. Elephants make calls below the bottom end of human hearing. Low frequencies travel further than high ones and get around obstacles better, so a herd can hold a conversation across distances where a shout would be useless, and a person standing in the middle of it registers nothing at all. Your child will have spent their whole life being told that elephants trumpet. Trumpeting is the small part.
There is a second channel underneath the first. Elephants pick up vibration through the ground, through the feet and up through the bones of the legs. An animal can register something arriving before there is anything to see or hear. Once a child has that, a herd behaving in unison stops being mysterious and starts being obvious.
Then the ears themselves, which are not for hearing so much as for cooling. An elephant ear is a broad sheet of skin loaded with blood vessels and held out into moving air. Blood runs through, gives up heat, and comes back cooler. That is why African elephants carry bigger ears than Asian elephants do, and it is a straight piece of physics that a nine year old can hold in one go: more surface, more heat lost.
Tanzy being the lone African elephant among the others is not a throwaway detail either. African and Asian elephants are different species, with different ears, different backs, different tusk patterns and different social fit. One animal placed among the other kind is a decision somebody made and has to keep managing. The book treats it as a real husbandry problem, which it is.
And there is the social side, which is the part most children have never been told. An elephant herd is a family, led by the oldest female. She carries the knowledge: where the water is, which route is safe, who is a stranger and who is not. So an elephant on its own is not a free elephant, it is an elephant cut off from every piece of information it normally runs on. That is why the search in this book is urgent rather than merely inconvenient.
The TurtleTown half is thinner, and it is fair to say so. That plot is about people, permits and money rather than turtles, and your child will finish the book without having learned much about the animals the place is named for. What they will have is the shape of how habitat is actually lost, which is not a villain with a gun. It is a builder with a lawful piece of paper and a machine.
The child it lands with
The child who has read every elephant book in the library and has started on the second pass through them.
The child already inside this series, who does not want a recommendation, only the next number.
And the child who argues. This book hands over a genuine ethical mess and does not sort it out, and the reader who enjoys taking a side will get a great deal out of it.
One place to stop and talk
Stop where Xavier's protest lands him in trouble. One question, and do not answer it yourself: was he right?
He was trying to save real ground. He broke a real machine belonging to somebody who had permission to use it. Both halves of that are true at once, and sitting in that discomfort for five minutes is the point.
What to know going in
There is an elephant loose and in danger, and the book keeps that fear running. Animals are threatened, people behave badly toward them, and one large frightened animal in the wrong place is treated as the emergency it would really be.
The humour is Gibbs being Gibbs. It is broad, it is aimed straight at nine year olds, and a fair amount of it is about what large animals do to the ground. If elephant dung as a running joke is going to irritate you, it will irritate you early.
The protest is the part that may need you. A child breaks a piece of expensive equipment because he believes the cause justifies it, and the book does not close that question off with a tidy verdict. That is good writing and it is also a conversation waiting in your living room. Better to know it is coming.
It is also book nine. Nothing here is impossible cold, but Xavier and Summer arrive with a history your child has not seen, and the emotional weight of a couple of scenes depends on it.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 at All Ears, which is the paperback price rather than the newest-book price, and there is no reason to wait for it to go lower.
The better use of the money is timing. Read this in the week before you go to a zoo that keeps elephants, then stand at the fence and say nothing. Count how long it takes your child to point at the ears and tell you what they are for. That is what the eight dollars is actually buying, and it does not work in the other order.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Curious World of Calpurnia Tate: Wild Is Not a Pet
The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Julie of the Wolves: The Science and the Caution
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
