We have read a lot of really good books this year in the Williams household. But as far as my two kids who are still at home (ages 9.5 and almost 5.5) are concerned, there is one clear winner. How do I know? Because every time we return this particular book to the public library, a couple of days later someone checks it right back out again. This has been going on all year long. And guess what they got yet again this week?
It is Florence and Richard Atwater’s 1938 classic Mr. Popper’s Penguins — which I have come to see as a sort of more cheerful and more earnest children’s version of Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin (a fantastic more recent novel that is definitely not for children, but very worthwhile reading for children’s parents).
The premise? The Poppers are a lovely classic all-American family in Minnesota–mom, dad, two kids. And then come the penguins. Or to be more precise, first they accidentally get one penguin, Captain Cook. It really is no bother keeping one penguin in your home–as the protagonist of Kurkov’s novel had found as well. Bathtubs are as convenient for housing a pet penguin in your modern family home as the two-car garage is for keeping that pet hippopotamus you got for Christmas.
But Captain Cook is awfully lonely being the only penguin in the house. So by way of a solution, a similarly lonely female penguin from the zoo joins the family too, but then the two penguins have a lot of baby penguins, and at that point the only obvious course of action is for the humans and the penguins to join forces to form a circus. It all goes about as smoothly as you might expect.
It all works out at the end–this is that sort of book, of course! Anyway, highly recommend. It seems the kids have been laughing even more on the re-reads than on the first round.