From the creator of the Spot collection of books, Rod Campbell comes this wonderful lift the flap book from the zoo. My daughter absolutely loves this book and is a firm favourite of ours at bedtime. We were given this book as a gift from my parents as they know she really likes Spot so thought she would enjoy this too. In fact this book to me looks a lot like the Spot books as well with obviously similar illustrations, colouring and writing.

We are told the story by the narrator who writes to the zoo to send him a pet and he then gets sent various animals but none of them are quite right. For example he gets sent an elephant but the elephant is too big so he ends him back. The picture of the elephant is behind the flap that you need to lift up and so it reveals what animal it was that was too big. The rest of the animals that the storyteller gets sent are a giraffe which is too tall, a lion which is too fierce, a camel which is too grumpy, a snake which is too scary, a monkey which is too naughty and a frog which is too jumpy. In the end the narrator gets sent the perfect pet, a cute little dog, I guess it always had to be a dog.

I like this book in that it teaches kids all about animals and their personal specific characteristics which is good for kids to learn. It also is made fun by the fact that they need to lift up the flaps to reveal the animals and provides some element of surprise and excitement when they lift up the flap to see what is underneath. The illustrations in this book are lovely and I think the animals look very realistic and cute.

My only criticisms with this book is that the animal word is never written down, i.e. when we see that the elephant is too big the word elephant is not written in the story, we just get the visual and I think it would be nice for the word to be written so it can help kids to learn the word. Also the flaps are quite flimsy and easily pulled off and we already have the lion and the camel stuck on again with sticky tape but I find this with the Spot books as well so maybe that is just the way they are.

All in all a lovely book that I recommend.