Teddy Fitzroy is on camera going into the koala exhibit. He is on camera coming out. In between, the koala disappears, and he is the only person the tape puts in the room.
This is the second FunJungle book. Teddy lives on the grounds of an enormous zoo and theme park because both his parents work there, which is the setup for the whole series. Here a school bully named Vance Jessup forces him into a prank, the prank goes badly wrong, Teddy hides inside the koala exhibit to get out of sight, and by the time anybody counts the animals he is the suspect in a theft that could put him in juvenile detention.
The science it actually teaches
Start with the honest part. This is a mystery, and the science arrives in short bursts, usually as an adult explaining something to Teddy while both of them are in a hurry. If you want a nature book with a plot attached, this is not that.
What it has instead is a subject almost nothing else on our Stealth Science shelf touches. Most animal books teach a child what an animal is. This one teaches what an animal is worth, and why, and those are not the same lesson.
The chain runs like this, and every link in it is real.
A koala eats eucalyptus and close to nothing else. Eucalyptus leaves are a bad deal: very little usable energy in them, and compounds that would poison most animals outright. A koala copes because of an extremely long gut and the microbes living in it, and it pays for that diet by doing almost nothing, resting close to twenty hours a day. A joey is not born with those microbes. It gets them by eating a soft maternal dropping called pap, which is exactly as revolting as it sounds and is the only reason the animal can eat at all.
Now put that animal in a zoo. It will not take dried leaves, or the wrong species of eucalyptus, or yesterday's. Somebody has to supply the right fresh browse every single day, which means growing it nearby or flying it in, which makes a koala one of the most expensive residents a collection can have. Few places can manage it. Few of the animals exist outside Australia.
That is the answer to the question the plot is really asking. A koala is valuable because it is difficult and rare, not because it is charming. Rarity is a price. It is also why a stolen one is in immediate trouble, because whoever took it almost certainly cannot feed it, and the trade in live animals kills most of what it moves for exactly that reason.
Economics and crime, taught through an animal's gut. Your child will take the whole chain on board without once noticing they were taught anything.
The child it lands with
The furious one. Teddy is innocent, the evidence points straight at him, and the adults do not believe him. For a certain nine or ten year old that is the most gripping situation there is, and they will read three hundred pages to see it put right.
A reluctant reader who refuses animal books will still read a suspect list, and this is a suspect list.
The child it will not land with is the one who wants the animal to be the point. For most of this book the koala is a stolen object, not a character.
One place to stop and talk
Find the moment where somebody puts a number on what the koala is worth. That is where to stop.
Two questions, in this order. First: who would pay that, and what could they possibly do with it afterwards? You cannot put a stolen koala in a public zoo. You cannot sell tickets to it. The buyer for a stolen rare animal is a strange, small, private sort of person, and working that out is half of understanding why the trade exists at all.
Second, and harder: why is it worth anything in the first place? Your child will reach for "because koalas are rare." Push once more. Rare compared to what, and rare because of what? The answer is the eucalyptus. The diet makes the animal expensive, expense makes it uncommon, uncommon makes it dear. A ten year old can hold that entire chain in their head, and once they have it they start seeing it in places you did not put it.
What to know going in
Three things, and the first one belongs to the series rather than to this book.
Stuart Gibbs writes broad, loud comedy for nine and ten year olds, and a large share of it is bodily functions. Vomit, feces, flatulence, animals producing all three at the worst possible moment, described rather than implied. The store's own copy for this title quotes a review praising its gross bodily functions, so this is a feature the publisher advertises, not an accident. If that register grates in your house it will grate here, and it does not calm down later in the series.
Vance is a genuine bully. He coerces Teddy physically and by threat, and the book does not write it off as harmless fun. If bullying is a live thing in your child's life right now, read this one alongside them rather than handing it over.
And there is real peril. Gibbs puts children in danger from adults who mean it, and an animal spends the book in danger from people who do not care whether it lives. The grade band of 4 to 7 is honest for decoding. The humour sits at the bottom of that band and the threat sits at the top, which is an odd pairing and worth knowing before you buy.
Where to get it
$8.99 in paperback at Poached.
It is the second FunJungle book, the mystery is self contained, and it reads perfectly well on its own. What makes it the one I would pull down first is that it is the book in the series where the crime and the science are the same subject. Hand it to the child who has started asking what things cost and why, and the koala biology comes along for free.
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.
