If I Ran the Zoo

Seuss's zoo is better and brighter than the ones we know.

Author: Dr. Seuss Illustrator: Dr. Seuss Pages: 60 Publisher: Random House Published Date: 01/01/1950 Genre: Fiction - For Beginning Readers HC Price: $14.95 Publisher's Recommended Reading Level: Ages 4-8 Read Aloud: 4+ Read Alone: 6+

Common Sense Note

Seuss's familiar powers give full value here: The cut-up verse skips like a step-dancing troupe, the creatures are crazily imaginative concoctions, and the narrator is amusing--and enviable.

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Common Sense Review

Reviewed By: Peter Lewis

A standard--and by that meaning the standard--Seuss joyride of verse and ridiculous creatures. Here is life lived as a fantastical experience, lit by an imagination that shimmers and bursts like fireworks.

Though the animals are pure figments, Seuss also depicts exotic landscapes that could very much be real, transporting readers into the adventure with Gerald McGrew as he globetrots in search of the best wild animals.

So evocative are the places that an eight-year-old rereading the book after an absence of three years announced "Russia!" when a snow-swept, spruce-darkened village of onion-domed cupolas came into view.

Here, too, Seuss stumbles as he dishes up some--by modern lights--shockingly quaint verbal and visual racial commentary: "I'll hunt in the mountains of Zomba-ma-Tant / With helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant," or the Indian chieftains whom Gerald will display along with the "scraggle-footed Mulligatawny," or the African porters. Now is as good a time as any to have a discussion about this racial typing.

Also at work in this book are some wonderful verbal high jinks that convey to readers the fun of language: "And, speaking of birds, there's the Russian Palooski, / Whose headski is redski and belly is blueski. / I'll get one of them for my Zooski McGrewski."

Not to be missed is Seuss's If I Ran the Circus, and you might also look at Jack Prelutsky and Peter Sis's droll, sometimes scary The Gargoyle on the Roof.

Plot Summary:

Seuss's zoo is better and brighter than the ones we know, with its Joats and Lunks and Mulligatawnies from locales like the Desert of Zind and the Wilds of Nantucket. Young Gerald McGrew imagines the creatures he would put on display, the distant lands where he would track them, and the inventive means he would use to trap them.

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