What do these five picture books have in common? Well, they are all about animals, but they range from pre-school books such as Shutting the Chooks in, through middle primary with Gezani and the Tricky Baboon, to books for older readers such as I Saw Nothing. They also vary generically: The Elephants’ Big Day Out and Sherlock Bones are fantasies, Gezani and the Tricky Baboon is a retelling of an African folk tale, and the other two are realistic stories.

To start with the fantasies: The Elephants’ Big Day Out is about three young elephants who are so frightened by a mouse that they leap through the bars of their cage in the zoo and ‘set out to explore’. They spend a wonderful day and finally hop on a tourist bus, which just happens to go to the zoo. There they discover that the poor keepers have had to disguise themselves as elephants for the grand parade. More significantly, they are so dismayed by the elephants’ cage that the next day it is transformed into a wonderland to which the young elephants eagerly return.