POO IN THE ZOO!
by Steve Smallman ; illustrated by Ada Grey
Proving that there’s always something new at the zoo, a pile of luminescent poop leaves even the designated poo-scooper flabbergasted.
Unsurprisingly, scooping up a zoo’s worth of doodoo every day—“Flying bits of bat poo / ‘Goodness, whose is that?’ poo. / A smelly pile of panda poo / sitting on the sand. / And Monkey always threw it / just as fast as he could do it”—makes young zookeeper Bob McGrew an expert on excreta. But who left the glowing glop? Aliens? Amid free-range arrays of dot-eyed, animated animals looking on with interest, Grey scatters sprays of brown spots, dots, smears, nuggets, and lumps of goo…capped by an outsized yellow-green deposit (not, alas, printed with glow-in-the-dark ink) left by an escaped gourmand iguana in the wake of an unbridled cafe food–and–firefly swarm buffet. The arrival of Hector Glue, proprietor of Glue’s Amazing Poo Museum, to buy the fecal firework provides Smallman with the opportunity for a second rollicking, rhymed catalog of caca: “I have a pile of yeti poo / and some that’s like spaghetti poo, / a smoking pile of dragon poo,” etc. Rows of carefully labeled museum exhibits continue on the endpapers.
Certain to excite gushes—of hysterical laughter, that is—from lone readers and storytime audiences alike. (Poopture book. 4-10)