This one is a comedy with a mystery inside it, and the animal content is thinner than the cover promises. Saying that first saves you the disappointment on page forty.
The seventh FunJungle book takes Teddy, his family and several park employees to a bison ranch outside Yellowstone that the park's owner is thinking about buying. The ranch's endangered bison keep vanishing. A large local grizzly the neighbours call Sasquatch comes through the house and wrecks it. In the mess afterward, a very expensive sapphire necklace turns out to be gone, and one working theory is that the bear swallowed it. There are more than a dozen suspects. That crowd of suspects, not the wildlife, is the engine of the book.
The science it actually teaches
There is one real piece of science here and it is a good one, which is enough to put the book on our Stealth Science shelf and not enough to let me oversell it.
The good one is the bison. Ask most adults to name an endangered animal and they will not pick the thing you can buy as a burger, so "endangered bison" sounds like nonsense until you know the genetics. Bison were shot down to almost nothing. Putting the numbers back meant crossing cattle into the herds, and a great many bison alive today carry cattle genes as a result. Herds without that mixing are rare and are managed carefully, and that, not the head count, is what people mean when they call bison endangered. A child who takes only that idea out of this book knows something most grown adults do not.
The bear is worth a line too. A grizzly that finds food at a house has been paid for coming, and it comes back bolder. That is why the rules about bins and feed exist, and why a bear that keeps returning usually ends badly for the bear. This book puts one inside a building with people in it, which makes the point better than a trailhead sign does.
The necklace gives you a real veterinary procedure dressed as a gag. Metal shows on a radiograph, so you find out whether the animal swallowed it before you do anything else. After that the job is waiting and sifting. Zoo veterinarians do this for real, with a straight face.
Underneath sits the argument this landscape actually has. A ranch beside a national park is a boundary only the people can see. Animals cross it and become somebody's livestock problem rather than somebody's protected wildlife. Much of the fight over bison in particular comes down to brucellosis, a disease cattle ranchers do not want near their herds. That is the world this ranch is standing in, whether or not the book names it.
What the book does not do is put you next to a bison. Nobody watches the animal for a page. Four good ideas and two hundred pages of people lying to each other is not a bad trade at this age. It is just not what the cover suggests.
The child it lands with
You already know whether this one works in your house, and there is a single question that settles it. Has your child ever laughed until they could not breathe at something involving animal droppings?
If the answer is yes, buy it. Half this book is built for that child on purpose.
The other reader it suits is already seven books in and does not want to be sold anything.
One place to stop and talk
The bear in the house is the place for this one. One question: why that house?
Not what the bear wanted. Why it came to that particular building rather than the next valley. Something there had fed it before, or smelled as though it would. That is the whole of bear management in one question and it takes about a minute.
What to know going in
A grizzly bear gets inside an occupied house. It is written to be frightening and it will frighten a sensitive reader, which is the correct response to a grizzly bear inside a house.
Animals are being taken and killed, mostly off the page. There are guns, there is threat, and adults in this series lie to children as a matter of routine.
Then the humour, and this is the real thing to know. A running gag about waiting for a bear to pass a necklace runs through a substantial part of the book. The toilet jokes are constant, they are aimed at nine year olds, and they land on nine year olds exactly as intended. Plenty of parents find this tiresome by the halfway mark. Your child will not. If crude humour is a hard line in your house, this is the FunJungle book most likely to cross it.
It is book seven, and it reads perfectly well cold, but the cast walks in already assembled and nobody stops to introduce them.
Where to get it
It is $8.99 at Bear Bottom, and unlike most of this series it comes with a place attached, so use the place.
If Yellowstone is on your calendar this year or next, put this book in the car. The bison your child will be watching through the window are the herd the whole genetics argument is actually about, and the bear rules on the board at the entrance gate are the ones this book has been joking about for two hundred pages. A book that turns a park sign into something your child already has an opinion about has earned its nine dollars twice over.
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.
