Your nine year old wants funny. You want the reading to be doing something. On most shelves those two want different books.
Henry the Hippo is on every cup, every hat and every sign at FunJungle, a brand new theme park the size of a small town. In the first chapter the real Henry is floating dead in his tank. Park management says he died the way animals die. Twelve year old Teddy Fitzroy, who lives on the grounds because both his parents work there, does not believe a word of it, and neither does Summer McCracken, whose father owns the place and is the least trustworthy adult in the book.
It opened a series that has run to ten novels since.
The science it actually teaches
The bathroom jokes are the price of admission. What your child buys with them is a working picture of how a zoo finds things out, and that is what puts this book on our Stealth Science shelf.
Start with the necropsy, because the whole plot hangs off it. A necropsy is an autopsy on an animal. Somebody opens the body, takes tissue, looks at what is in the stomach, and sends samples out for chemistry. It is the difference between an animal being dead and anybody knowing why, and the book is honest that those are two entirely separate things. A child who has read this understands that "he died of natural causes" is a claim, and that a claim has to be paid for with evidence. That habit is worth more than any single fact in the book.
Then the hippo itself. FunJungle sells Henry as a fat, smiling, purple cartoon. A hippo is territorial, ill tempered, faster in water than you expect, and carries tusks in a jaw that opens far wider than a picture book admits. It is one of the animals in Africa that kills the most people, and none of that is on the merchandise. Henry in the book is foul, and he sprays. A hippo really does spin its tail to fling dung around the edge of its territory, so the loudest joke in the first act is also the one real behaviour most children take away. That is the trade this whole series makes.
Underneath there is ordinary husbandry, mostly shown rather than explained. Hippos foul the water they live in, so a hippo pool is a filtration problem before it is an exhibit. Diet is controlled and recorded. Keepers know their animals by habit, which is why a change in appetite is a symptom before anything visible is.
And running through it is the argument the book is actually about: a park built to move a hundred thousand people a day and an animal built for a river want different things, and the man holding the money is not neutral. Gibbs does not tidy that up at the end.
Be clear about the depth. This is a mystery with jokes, and the science is a layer rather than a spine. There is no chapter that teaches you a hippo the way a nature book would. What it teaches properly is the procedure: do not take the official cause, ask what the evidence shows, and notice who benefits from the answer.
The child it lands with
The reluctant reader who has worked out that being told reading is good for them is not an argument. This book is loud, fast and funny inside two pages, and that is the entire point of it.
Also the child who has said out loud that they want to work with animals, and who has only ever been handed sad animal books to prove it. Nothing dies beautifully here. Somebody killed a hippo and somebody is going to be caught for it.
And the child who is nine to twelve and has decided that most books at their level are written for younger children. This one is not.
One place to stop and talk
There is a moment when your child notices that the Henry on the T-shirts and the Henry in the tank are not the same animal. That is the one.
The question is not which one is real. Your child already knows. The question is which one the park sells, and why. Purple, round and smiling moves merchandise. Territorial, tusked and dangerous does not.
Then push one step further, because this is the part that lasts. What happens to a person who grows up on the cartoon and then meets the animal? They are frightened by a perfectly normal hippo, or worse, they are not frightened at all. A zoo that lies about what an animal is has not made anybody safer, and it has not made anybody care about the right thing either. That is a live argument inside conservation and your fourth grader can hold both ends of it.
What to know going in
The humour is aimed squarely at nine year olds and a great deal of it is bodily. Dung, vomit, and what a hippo can do to a crowd of visitors. If that is unwelcome in your house you will know by the end of chapter one rather than by page two hundred, which is at least fair warning.
The danger is not a joke. Somebody tries to hurt Teddy, more than once, and it is written to be frightening. An animal is deliberately killed, and that killing is the premise of the book rather than a sad accident near the end.
The adults are a problem on purpose. The owner counts money first, the head of operations dislikes animals, and several grown people lie straight at a child's face. Most children enjoy this enormously. If yours is the sort who needs at least one reliable adult standing in a story, know that the reliable ones here are Teddy's parents and almost nobody else.
Where to get it
Start here. This is book one, it is where the park and the cast get built, and every later book assumes you already know who Summer is and why her father cannot be trusted. It is $8.99 at Belly Up.
The later ones read perfectly well out of order once this one has been read. That does not work in the other direction, so if your child is going to end up ten books deep, and plenty of them do, this is the eight dollars that makes the other nine make sense.
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.
