SON OF THE PINK GORILLA

A pink gorilla surprises the narrator in this early reader from Todd.

The book opens with Jesse, a young boy, narrating a wild tale to Rosalinda, whom he’s just run into in an alley. Jesse tells her a whopping story (a variation on an age-old dad joke involving a pink or sometimes purple gorilla). His best friend Phil, who’s quite a bit older than Jesse, calls him urgently asking for help, but he’s secretive about the reason. It turns out, Phil’s keeping a fuzzy, live, pink gorilla in a small cage in his creepy basement. Transfixed, Jesse tries to stick his arm in to pet the gorilla before Phil unequivocally forbids him to do so. Phil asks Jesse to feed the gorilla one banana per day while Phil is on vacation. Jesse obsesses over the creature and has nightmares about it. He wonders, “What would it be like to touch that warm, soft, fuzzy, pink gorilla?”Unsurprisingly, Jesse can’t control himself, and he strokes the gorilla’s back. Terrified, he scrambles out of the house and bikes away as fast as he can, catching a glimpse of the gorilla chasing him. Turning down an alley, Jesse braces himself, eyes shut. The gorilla touches Jesse’s head and says, “Tag! You’re it!” Rosalinda surprises Jesse by telling a similar story about her best friend Ayla then asks Jesse if he notices anything about himself. Jesse realizes that he has become the pink gorilla. The story is a page-turner, and the digital illustrations by Vilches vaguely resemble anime characters, but the ages of the characters are unclear, and more context would be welcome. The prose is richly descriptive when the author writes about, for example, the screeching doors and dusty underground tunnel. Since this is an early reader, it’s worth noting that there’s a distinctly unsafe scenario in which an adult leads a child to a basement and asks the child to keep everything a secret. Still, this is a lively story with a killer ending that will hook and/or terrify readers.

An inventive tale that may spook its audience.