Nobody takes a baby gorilla quietly.
An infant gorilla lives inside a family that will stand between it and anything that comes, which means the ordinary way one reaches a buyer is that the adults around it are killed first. That is the arithmetic underneath this whole book, and Stuart Gibbs does not hide it from a fourth grader.
A baby gorilla is stolen from an orphanage in Rwanda. Teddy Fitzroy, his parents and an old family friend go after it, across some very large country, while Teddy is also working a second case back at FunJungle by phone with Summer. It is the tenth book in the series and it is the one that leaves the theme park furthest behind.
The science it actually teaches
The subject does more of the work here than the jokes do, which is not the usual balance in this series, and it is why this one sits on our Stealth Science shelf with the weight it does.
Begin with the orphanage, because a child will not have thought about why such a place exists. Gorilla orphanages exist because the trade produces orphans. The infant is the thing being sold and the family is the cost of taking it. Once your child has that, the words on the back of the book stop being an adventure premise and start being a supply chain.
Which leads to the part that surprises most adults too. A rescued infant gorilla cannot simply be put back. It needs years of milk and handling, and more than that it needs other gorillas, because a great deal of what a gorilla knows is learned from the ones around it rather than born in. Hand rearing an ape is a long, expensive, human-intensive job with an uncertain ending. Rescue is the beginning of a decade of work, not the happy last page.
Then the fact almost nobody teaches children and everybody should. Humans and gorillas catch the same diseases. A cold you would shrug off can move through a group of apes that has never met it. That is the actual reason gorilla tourists are kept at a distance and asked to wear masks, and it is the least intuitive idea in the book: the danger a visitor poses is not that they might be violent, it is that they might be breathing.
Then the money, which is the strongest thing in here. Gorilla viewing is expensive on purpose. Permits cost a great deal and that money is what pays the people who guard the forest. It means a living gorilla is worth more to the country it lives in than a dead one, every year, for as long as it lives. Conservation runs on that arithmetic far more than it runs on sentiment, and it is genuinely rare to find a children's book willing to say so.
And the trade itself is drawn as a trade. Wildlife moves through the same ports, markets and middlemen as everything else that moves illegally. It is logistics, not one villain in a hut, and the book takes Teddy through the ordinary places where ordinary goods change hands. A child who reads this understands that stopping it is a customs and money problem as much as a wildlife one.
Be honest about the rest of it. The Serengeti chapters and the lions are scenery and pace. They are exciting and they are not teaching anything much. The geography is a chase route rather than an ecology lesson, and if you were hoping for East African grassland science, that is not what this book is doing.
The child it lands with
This one wants a slightly older reader than the store band suggests at its bottom end.
It suits the eleven or twelve year old who has begun to notice that the world has systems in it, and who is ready to be told that a bad thing happens because it pays somebody rather than because somebody is wicked.
It suits the child who wants something real to be angry about. There is a lot of energy in a fifth grader with a genuine grievance, and this book hands them one that is worth having.
It also suits the child who has been quietly bored by the last few FunJungle books. The park formula is gone here and the stakes are the highest in the series.
One place to stop and talk
The conversation worth having is about money, which is not where a child expects a conversation about gorillas to go.
Ask what a living gorilla is worth, and to whom. Not in feeling, in money. A poacher is paid once. A guarded forest that people pay to visit earns its country something every year for the whole life of every animal in it, and it pays wages to people who live there. That is why the guards exist and why the permits cost what they cost.
Then turn it over, because the honest version has a second half. It also means the animals are safe as long as the tourists keep coming, and that is a thin thread to hang a species on. Your child will get there on their own if you leave the silence open long enough. That is the real lesson and it is not a comfortable one.
What to know going in
This is the heaviest book in the series and the caution is longer for good reason.
Poaching in this book is killing. Adults die so that an infant can be taken, and it is on the page rather than implied at a safe distance. There are guns, there is a chase, and there are children in real physical danger a very long way from home. A sensitive nine year old will feel all of it.
There is a shape to the story worth naming out loud with an older child. An American family flies to Africa and solves a problem for people who live there. The book is more careful about this than many are, and the shape is still there, and the conversation about who usually gets to be the rescuer in a story is a good one to have while the book is open rather than years later.
The humour has not gone anywhere either. Gibbs writes broad and bodily comedy for nine year olds and it is still here, sitting a few pages away from dead gorillas. Some readers find that jarring. It is worth knowing it is coming so it does not feel like a bait and switch.
And it is book ten, with a cast and a set of relationships built over nine previous books. It carries more history than any other entry point in the series.
Where to get it
It is $17.99 at Ape Escape, which is roughly twice what the older FunJungle paperbacks cost. The reason is simply that this is the newest one and it is still in hardcover, and that gap closes on its own eventually.
So the honest advice splits. If your child is new to the series, this is not the book to spend eighteen dollars on first; the earlier paperbacks do the job for half of it and build the cast this one leans on. If your child is already nine books deep and has been asking, buy it, because nothing else on this shelf covers this ground and no cheaper edition of it exists yet.
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.
