Parcel For Gorilla

Shelley Knoll-Miller

Puffin, 2023

24pp., hbk., RRP $A14.99

9781761046629

There’s a strange rumbling deep in the jungle and it’s coming from Gorilla’s tummy! But his friends’ attempts to get him a coconut to stop it are abandoned when the postmaster arrives with a parcel for Gorilla that is so big, he needs an elephant to deliver it!   What could be inside?

And so the fun begins as they try to guess and because it is more than just Gorilla’s tummy rumbling all the thoughts are on food! But what sort of food needs a box that big? Is it, indeed, food?

The young reader will have fun using their imaginations too –what would they send Gorilla? – and they will adore not only what Penguin has sent but what Gorilla does with it! Talk about “thinking outside the box” – pun intended!

As with Parcel for Penguin, our youngest readers will delight in being part of the storytelling as they try to predict what could be in the box using their existing knowledge, the eye-catching pictures and the conversational text.  Who can’t hear someone hissssssing like Snake?

This is one that offers so much to develop their joy in stories, their delight in being able to return to it again and again, and their belief that they, too, can be a reader that it is definitely be a series on every little one’s shelves.  And with two more to come – Koala in July and Turtle in October – there is much to look forward to.