5-Minute Amazing Animal Stories
5-Minute Amazing Animal Stories
WILLIE’S NEW WORD
Willie the parrot was a pretty smart bird. That is, he was pretty and he was smart.
His plumage was multicolored and glorious.
And his brain was always on. With a quick mind like his, Willie needed to keep himself busy. Sometimes he would gather small objects he found around the house and make a nest. Sometimes he would sit and chew on things. And sometimes he would talk.
Boy, did he like talking. It didn’t matter if anyone was listening.
Mostly, he spoke parrot. It was his first language, after all. But his owner, Megan had taught him some English. He could say Mama and hello and bye-bye, and he was hoping to add to that list.
The idea behind 5-Minute Amazing Animal Stories is that each of the 12 stories in the collection can be read aloud in five minutes. While a cover detail says “Featuring Real-Life ANIMAL HEROES!”, the animals are treated in a highly anthropomorphic manner by author Howden, and that approach, coupled with Tian’s very cartoony illustrations, will probably cause the collection to appeal much more to the younger end of the publisher’s suggested age range.
Howden employs the term “hero” in a broader sense than simply saving lives, and she exemplifies this usage in the first story, “The Seeing-Eye Cat”, in which a cat becomes the visual guide for a family’s aging and visually impaired dog. The cat in “Tara, the Cat Warrior” is more the traditional heroine as she rescues her young owner from being seriously mauled by a neighbor’s dog. Dogs become heroes in “Buddy Leads the Way” and “One Strong Swimmer”. In the former, a dog leads rescue vehicles to a fire occurring in a remote location while, in the latter, a dog valiantly swims a lifeline ashore when a storm grounds a ship on rocks.
One of the strengths of this collection is that Howden incorporates stories of unusual and unexpected animal heroes. The parrot in “Willie’s New Word” saves a two-year-old’s life when the bird combines “Mama” with a new word, “baby”, to alert a caregiver that the child is choking. The pot-bellied pig in “LuLu, the Lifesaving Pig” uses the doggy door to seek help outside the house when its owner collapses on the floor. A humpback whale features in “Humpback Hero” as it shields a swimmer from a tiger shark, and a pod of beluga whales come to the assistance of a lost narwhal in “Beluga Buddies”. One horse rescues another in “Beau and Beatrice”, and “Sergeant Reckless” finds a horse of the same name hauling ammunition to the front lines during the Korean War and then carrying wounded marines back to aid stations. A herd of elephants free a group of trapped antelopes in “Elephants to the Rescue”. When a child falls into a zoo’s gorilla enclosure, a female gorilla’s maternal instincts cause her to come to the child’s assistance in “A Gentle Giant”.
Heavily illustrated with small amounts of text on each page, 5-Minute Amazing Animal Stories is, as promised by the title, a quick read.
Dave Jenkinson, CM’s editor, lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.