A house painter in a small town wishes he had gone on polar expeditions instead. An explorer he wrote to sends him a penguin. The penguin is lonely, so they get another one, and then there are twelve penguins living in the basement and the family goes on the road as a performing act. Published 1938, Newbery Honor.
Why it earns read-aloud time
Because it is funny out loud, and because it is about nothing.
Look at the rest of this list. Grief, war, a spider dying, a boy in a desert work camp. Those books are on it for good reasons. But a child fed nothing but worthy books learns that reading is a thing you endure to become a better person, and that is how you lose a reader by eleven.
This one has no lesson. Twelve penguins wreck a house. Mr. Popper cuts a hole in the freezer door. The plumbing situation gets out of hand. Your child laughs, you laugh, and nobody grows.
That is a real service. Put it between two heavy books on purpose.
The child it lands with
The one who is done being taught. Also the four-year-old sibling hovering at the edge of the room during a read-aloud aimed at somebody older, because this is the one they can follow.
And the kid who thinks reading is homework. There is no way to feel like you are doing homework while somebody describes a penguin walking down a staircase.
One place to stop and talk
At the end, Mr. Popper gives the penguins up. He hands them to the explorer to be taken north, even though he loves them and they made him famous.
Ask your child whether that was the right call. It is the only serious question in the whole book and it is a good one, precisely because the book has spent a hundred pages earning the right to ask it.
What to know going in
It is from 1938 and it reads like it. The pacing is unhurried, some of the humor is gentle to the point of mild, and a child raised on fast books may find the first two chapters slow before the penguin shows up.
The Poppers are poor and the book treats that lightly, in a way a modern book would handle differently. Nothing in it is cruel, but it is a period piece, and if your child asks why nobody seems worried about money, that is a fair thing to talk about rather than smooth over.
Where to get it
It is on our shelf at Mr. Popper's Penguins, on the Third-Grade Read-Alouds shelf. It is also on the full list of ten.
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