The final picture is a lovely surprise, as the zoo thought very hard and: The buttons are not in the same order as the pictures in the book either, so the child has to think, and look carefully to choose the right one. “grumpy” and “grumbling” “jumpy” and “croaking”. The lion was too fierce, the camel too grumpy, the snake too scary, the monkey too naughty, the frog too jumpy … Each time the reason for returning the animal is different, and the words of the instruction are also slightly different (eg. After the elephant comes a giraffe ( “press the giraffe button to hear the giraffe munching”) who was “too tall”. The story goes through seven animals in turn.

It stands proud throughout the read as the pages are turned, and lies flush with the padded cover when the book is closed. The ladder of buttons is set into a raised platform down the right hand side of the book. A simple instruction to press the button is underneath the main text each time. The sounds are operated by a series of 8 colour-coded buttons, each with a picture of the appropriate animal. It is a “noisy” book! And I can assure you (because I’ve done this myself) that if you accidentally sit on it, you will find that it might trumpet at you, or chatter like a monkey, or even (and this is a bit scary if you’re not expecting it!) even hiss like a snake! Lift the flap, and we see … an elephant! And the words:īut this book has a delightful extra feature. They sent me an …”Īnd just as in the original book, the opposite page shows a mysterious “something”, hidden in a crate. This review is for Dear Zoo: Noisy Book, which I think is the best of all the many versions and formats.

It is his most famous work, and thirty-five years later, it is still tremendously popular among the under fives in Great Britain, and has been translated into more than a dozen different languages. “Dear Zoo” was written as a lift-the-flap board book in 1982, by the Scottish author, Rod Campbell.

Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell