The Zoo Box
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When Erika and Patrick's parents leave them home alone for the night, they head straight to the attic to explore. When they open a mysterious box, hundreds of animals come pouring out! Soon the town is awash in more and more zoo animals, until Erika and Patrick discover that the tables have been turned... and the animals now run a zoo full of humans!
With simple text and bright, graphic art, Ariel Cohn and Aron Neils Steinke have created a gentle, fantastical adventure for the very youngest of readers. The Zoo Box will be a terrific introduction to comics for both learning readers and their parents.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The box that must not be opened is a tried-and-true storytelling device; Cohn and Steinke's graphic novel style picture book, however, is anything but formulaic. Patrick and Erika are left alone in their pajamas when their parents go out; if they behave, they can go to the zoo the next day. The siblings promptly discover a hatbox in the attic labeled "do not open," which Patrick opens, releasing a menagerie of full-size animals that make their way to the zoo. Erika and Patrick follow, only to discover that the zoo's visitors are animals, and the zoo animals are "Patrick!" Erika cries, "They keep humans in this zoo!" A breathless chase scene follows ("The humans are escaping!"); Erika and Patrick manage to elude their captors and stuff everyone back into the box just in time. Cohn's minimal text is simultaneously funny and foreboding; it's balanced by Steinke's doll-like figures, whose pin-dot eyes and stiff movements ease the tension. It's not hard to see why the promise of a trip to the zoo loses its luster for Patrick and Erika; readers may think twice, too. Ages 5 7.
