OUR CLASS TOOK A TRIP TO THE ZOO

Neitzel continues her rebus stories (I’m Not Feeling Well Today, 2001, etc.), this time with a zoo setting of sorts. Her cumulative piece of verse has the mesmerizing qualities of a drone, with its eight-count beat, but the series of incidents it describes, along with Parker’s jaunty rebus-filled, pen-and-pencil artwork, keep the work rolling merrily along on a tide of rhyme and cottony color. On a trip to the zoo, a young boy first forgets his jacket when visiting with the chimpanzees. Then he spills his lunch and rips his pants and pops a button in a cascading number of mishaps that by the end of the tale has him left in rags and tatters, but dazzled by the fun he has been having and the new friends he has been meeting. Eventually, it all piles up: “my shirt got wet at the water fountain, / my hat blew away near Billy Goat Mountain, / a button popped off by the lion’s den, / I tore my pants on the ostriches’ pen . . . ” with appropriate insertions of rebuses with each happenstance. Both the artwork and the verse have a tranquillity about them that is comforting, while the minor calamities that beset the zoo-goer are enough to keep piquing the reader’s interest. Still funny after all these years. (Picture book. 3-7)