Books written for children are always great reading. Stories for children by children are even better. Jungle Trouble: Rory’s Rescue Plan is a children’s book written by Sofia Haq when she was 6 (she is now 8), co-authored with her mother, Bibi Y Haq and fantastically illustrated by Ishrat Ahmed.
Jungle Trouble: Rory’s Rescue Plan is a jungle tale about the poaching of jungle animals, a daring rescue plan, friendship and working as a team. The story was inspired by one of Sofia’s drawings and a visit to Wingham Wildlife Park (to read an interview with Bibi Y Haq, visit theisleofthanetnews.com).
The jungle is home to a variety of different animals that go about their daily lives not bothering anyone. But there is trouble brewing. A team of poachers have entered the home of the animals and ‘kidnapped’ (poached) Gavin the gorilla, Elsa the elephant and Richard the rhino! They have been put in cages in the poachers camp ready to be taken out of the jungle.
Rory, the King of the Jungle and a strong courageous lion gathers all the other animals to inform his fellow jungle inhabitants of the terrible news and devises a cunning rescue plan to get their friends back. Each animal is assigned a job to scare off the poachers and free their captured friends. But will they be successful?
Overall, this is an excellent children’s story emphasising the problem of animal poaching, friendship, teamwork and problem solving. Underlying the story is also the message of no matter how different the animals are, they all support and help each other.
This is a fun story of a daring and cunning rescue plan devised and carried out by all the jungle animals to bring their friends home. The illustrations, by Ishrat Ahmed, are bold, bright and vivid and tell the story visually extremely well.
And despite it being a tale of the very real and serious problem of animal poaching, it is an engaging story that is easy to read, follow and understand.
And buried throughout the pages of the story is an activity for children to do – on some of the pages there will be images of the life cycle of a butterfly that the young readers can try and spot as they are reading the story. A fun activity that will keep the young readers buried in the book trying to spot all the images (they will know what to look out for as the images they will need to find are at the start of the book).
A very good story of how teamwork and supporting each other can help to solve problems, told with a diverse collection of jungle animals from Colin the Crocodile to Rosie the Flamingo.
Rating: 5/5
RRP: £8.99 (Paperback) / £4.99 (Kindle)
Available to buy from Amazon here.
