Nuptse & Lhotse Go to the Prairies

Heading home from their exciting experience at the North Pole in Nuptse & Lhotse in the Land of the Midnight Sun, Nuptse and Lhotse find their hot-air balloon blown off course. Landing in a field on the Canadian Prairies, the two curious cats discover a poster for a scavenger hunt, the start of a new adventure. With the help of a scruffy looking coyote, Coulee, the sister-brother cat team set out to find the items on the list ranging from ‘a sweet treat from a homesteader’s hearth’ to ‘grains of gold from the top of a king’s tower’ to ‘a player’s stick from a winter’s game’.

As they travel across the flat grasslands with interesting prairie landmarks, they meet a variety of colourful characters, like Digger the gopher, a mouse named the Wheat King, a pronghorn antelope, hockey-playing bison and even a horse called Horseshoe Joe. A ‘barnyard bash’ ends another amazing adventure for this pair of funny, adventurous felines.

Author and illustrator Jocey Asnong showcases another exciting adventure for Nuptse and Lhotse, this time exploring the landscape of the Canadian Prairies. The brilliant colours in the large expressive, whimsical illustrations will draw the reader into looking at each page to discover the rich details that enhance the storytelling. The text is humorous and filled with those special prairie features: a sod house, Saskatoon pie, prairie dog tunnels, dinosaur digs, grain elevators, a snowstorm, bison, and cattle ranches. While the scavenger hunt draws Nuptse and Lhotse across this unique region of Canada, the combination of the detailed artwork with the narrative and informative text provides the reader with both background and appreciation of what makes a place unique.

Nuptse & Lhotse Go to the Prairies will appeal to a varied reading audience. Whether readers’ interests lie in animal adventures, humour, learning about places and history or just a fun read with fabulous illustrations, they will likely want to add the other books in this series to their reading list. For the younger children, reading this story aloud invites questions they might have about terms, different animals and places as well as a providing shared enjoyment of a funny story.