Help the Kind Lion

The Inside Scouts need to help a lion. They do this by using their powers to become super small and enter their patient’s body. The lion has a leaky heart valve. Sanjay and Viv enter the lion’s body and make their way to the heart. They find the leak and use their tools to repair it. To get out of the lion’s body, they tickle its lungs and get sneezed out.

The back of this book specifically shows that the target audience is kindergarten and grade one students. This is very accurate. The young audiences that this reviewer read it to had varying responses to it. The youngest audiences were kindergarten and grade one, and the overall consensus was that it was good! The older audiences of grade two and three students were more varied in their reviews, with some saying it was too short and others saying they liked it. Specifically, they added the details that they liked that the Inside Scouts entered the body through the nose or that the sneeze exit was funny.

The artwork by Francesca Mahaney is simple yet helps to punctuate the story with needed emotions and details. The story by Mitali Banerjee Ruths offers a unique style that allows young readers to both enjoy an exciting animal like a lion with a real problem that medical science can tackle. The story did allow for many chances for the young readers to be asked questions. For example, it was interesting to observe the kindergarten students employ empathy for the lion who is unable to play and run with her cubs. They were quite happy that the Inside Scouts were able to help the lion heal.

Overall, the combination of a cool superhero story and an exciting animal made for a book that met the needs of the specific audience. One constraint of this book is that it is a bit small in size to display to an audience (the size of a small early-reading chapter book) compared to other books that might be read aloud to students of this age. Another limitation is the very narrow audience range as school library budgets may not allow for this purchase when thinking about broad application in a school setting. This title (and other books in the series) are likely more appropriate for a classroom library.