Author: Bryan Chick
Series: Secret Zoo
Genre: Fantasy, Middle grade
Publication date: October 6, 2007
Book description (from GoodReads): Noah, his sister Megan, and their best friends, Richie and Ella, live next door to the zoo. Megan is the first to notice the puzzling behavior of some of the animals. One day Megan disappears, and her brother and their friends realize it's up to them to find her. Their only choice is to follow a series of clues and sneak into the zoo. But once inside, will they discover there's much more to the Clarksville City Zoo than they could ever have guessed?
Review:
The target audience is middle grade, so I am a bit off. With that said, the sibling love, friendship and animals represented made it an amazing read. This is a quick read full of adventures.
There are a lot of great children literature, this came off as amateurish. The storyline is predictable, the language used is too simplistic and yet it had the classic 6 year old attempts of humor and being funny. So of course I didn't find it funny.
Example: when Ella describes her slippers "they were like two pink Chihuahuas begging for a snack."
With that said I do not mean it as a bad thing exactly. Compared to their target audience, it's acceptable. Just don't go into it with huge literary expectations.
This starts with Megan being missing. She disappeared in the middle of the night one day. The parents have a very realistic reaction, they start to run search parties with the members of the community. The book does not focus n the parents so the grief of having a child go missing is not explored. Both parents leave Noah, the younger sibling, alone at home with the understanding that he will spend the afternoons at one of his friend's house while his parents are in the search HQ. Noah cannot just wait for Megan to be found. He starts to look for clues on what could have happened to his sister.
When she disappeared, Megan was looking into the zoo. That's where Noah starts his search. He gets mysterious arts of Megan's journal while he is exploring the zoo. The clue comes from unknown source, and that's how the mystery starts.
The search is not done on his own, the fact that they include no adults - is very classic in middle grade, the world is ending and a elementary child is in charge of saving the world. Makes perfect sense, that aspect has been rubbing me the wrong way but its a very common aspect, so let's move on.
Noah and his friends are all involved, when he starts to share what he suspects about his missing sister having to do with the zoo and a specific exhibition. They all start to help him search for clues, among the way hiding from the guards and the people working on the zoo. They meet animals who are amazingly smart and seem to understand them, there are occasions that they find more animals than the exhibits supposed to hold. Some of the animals who the only thing missing is the ability to talk, start guiding the kids over to portals that transport them to a hidden world where animals of every habitat and even some extinct ones live.
One of the things that make no sense- why does every bird need to fly? It is an aspect to move along the plot but really making dodo and penguins learn to fly seem to be a bit pointless. Anyhow the animals and kids need to save Megan after they discover she might have been socked into another dimension that serves as a prison for creature that can destroy the world.
This was a quick read, recommended for young reader just getting into reading habit. The start and end is action packed and adventurous, can't put it down. The middle is a bit slow and it feels like it drags for no particular reason, but I assume children will really enjoy the story without critizicing much.
This book was used for the challenges:
Buzzwordathon- the buzz word for March is secret.
Children's books
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