Unlikely Friendships for Kids: The Monkey & the Dove: And Four Other Stories of Animal Friendships

by Jennifer S. Holland

Overview

Good friends come in all shapes and sizes!

Unlikely Friendships, the runaway New York Times bestseller with a compelling message of hope and friendship and differences overcome, is rewritten just for younger readers. This hardcover chapter book for children ages seven and up collects five heartwarming true stories of animal friendship: a dog that loves an elephant, a bear and a cat who become best friends, a house cat who looks after a dog as he goes blind, a lioness who protects a baby antelope, and a dove who befriends a baby Rhesus monkey.

Chapter books give young readers a strong sense of accomplishment, and these heartwarming animal stories, with their incredible photographs and inexplicable mysteries of attraction, their focus on friendship, love, and the ways that creatures of all different species can find common bonds of affection, will keep kids turning the pages to find out about the unusual ways animals help each other and discover the love of new friends.

Each is a perfect gift for young animal lovers, and a lovely subject to help kids get reading.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761170112
Publisher:	Workman Publishing Company
Publication date:	05/02/2012
Series:	Unlikely Friendships for Kids , #1
Pages:	48
Sales rank:	523,444
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	620L (what's this?)
Age Range:	7 - 18 Years

About the Author

Jennifer S. Holland is a contributing writer for National Geographic. She has also written for, among others, The Discovery Channel, NPR, and The New York Times, specializing in science and natural history.

 

Editorial Reviews

The author of an adult book about uncommon animal attachments invites emergent readers to share the warm (Unlikely Friendships, 2011). This is the first of four spinoffs, all rewritten and enhanced with fetching color photographs of the subject. It pairs a very young rhesus monkey with a dove, one cat with a zoo bear and another that became a "seeing-eye cat" for a blind dog (!), an old performing elephant with a stray dog and a lion in the Kenyan wild with a baby oryx. Refreshingly, the author, a science writer, refrains from offering facile analyses of the relationships' causes or homiletic commentary. Instead, she explains how each companionship began, what is surprising about it and also how some ended, from natural causes or otherwise. There is a regrettable number of exclamation points, but they are in keeping with the overall enthusiastic tone. The sense of wonder that infuses each simply worded chapter is contagious, and some of the photos are soooo cuuuuute. (animal and word lists) (Nonfiction. 7-9)

Kirkus Reviews