The truck backs in. The doors come open. The crate that is supposed to be holding Li Ping, a giant panda the park spent a fortune and a long negotiation to get hold of, is empty.
That is the opening problem of the fourth FunJungle book, and the reason it escalates the way it does, with federal agents turning up inside a chapter or two, is that a giant panda is not like any other animal a zoo can lose. Teddy Fitzroy would have been perfectly happy to leave this one to the professionals. Somebody threatens his girlfriend Summer to make sure he does not.
The science it actually teaches
Here is what our Stealth Science shelf is for. A child picks this up for the heist and puts it down knowing what a panda actually is.
Start with ownership, because it is the strangest true thing in the book. A zoo outside China does not buy a panda. It rents one. Pandas go out under agreements that run for years and cost a great deal of money every year, and cubs born abroad are not the zoo's either. Your child will not believe you. That reaction is the point.
Then the animal itself. A giant panda has the digestive system of a meat eater and eats bamboo almost exclusively, which is close to the worst idea in mammal biology. It gets very little out of any given mouthful, so it has to put away enormous quantities and spend most of its waking hours doing it. A slow panda is not a lazy panda. It is a fuel problem.
Then the thumb, which is not a thumb. A wrist bone has grown outward into a pad the animal presses a bamboo stalk against with its real fingers. Evolution had no spare digit lying around, so it built one out of something else.
Then breeding, which is where the money and the biology finally meet. A female is receptive for a few days a year. Miss the window and there is no cub until the next one comes round. And when a cub does arrive it is blind, pink, and roughly the size of a stick of butter, next to a mother who outweighs a grown man several times over. Nothing about the arrangement is easy, and that is precisely why one animal is worth an international agreement and a federal investigation.
Moving a panda is its own operation as well. A crate, keepers, a supply of bamboo, and transport built around one animal. The plot needs all of that to be true, and it is.
This carries more straight animal biology than the other FunJungle books, and it is still a mystery first. The facts arrive in short bursts between jokes. Do not expect a text.
The child it lands with
There is a specific child this is aimed at, and it is the one who thinks they already know about pandas. Every kid does. Pandas are bamboo, black and white, and endangered, and that is the whole file. This book opens the file back up inside about thirty pages.
It is also the biggest crime in the series so far, which matters to a mystery reader who has started finding the smaller ones predictable. A theft with federal agents in it feels like a step up when you are ten.
At the bottom of the grade band, know that Teddy has a girlfriend and the plot leans on her. It is mild, it is mostly played for laughs, and some nine year olds are bored stiff by it.
One place to stop and talk
Take the word expensive apart with your child, right at the point where somebody says what the panda is worth.
What makes an animal expensive? Not what it costs to feed. A panda is costly because there are few of them, because one country controls all of them, because holding one means signing up for years, and because you cannot make more on demand. That last one is biology setting a price, which is a connection most adults have never made out loud.
Then a follow up worth the extra five minutes. If you cannot buy one, what does it even mean to steal one?
What to know going in
This book does not put an animal's life on the page the way the poaching book in the same series does. What it puts there instead is blackmail. Someone threatens a child to force another child to act, and coercion aimed at a kid has its own particular nastiness even when the book plays the rest of the plot for laughs.
The comedy is the standing warning for this author and it does not let up here. Gibbs writes big, loud, physical humour for nine year olds, and a large share of it is about animal waste, smells, and adults being humiliated in public. It is not subtle, and it will not be changing.
There is also a running romance thread. Low stakes, mostly comic, and worth knowing about if you are reading this in a room with a younger sibling who asks questions.
Where to get it
The paperback is $8.99 at Panda-Monium. It is the fourth FunJungle book and it stands on its own fine, although it does give away who is dating whom in the earlier ones, which matters far more to a ten year old than it will to you. Hand it to the child who says pandas are boring. They are wrong, and this is the fastest way to prove it that does not involve a plane ticket.
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.
