For Kids.(A Room with a Zoo, The Clouds Above, The Bear and the People, The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature)(Children's Review)(Book Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A Room with a Zoo, by Jules Feiffer (Michael Di Capua; $16.95). Julie, the nine-year-old narrator of this novel for children (whose father happens to be a cartoonist named Jules), has an urgent desire to own a Chihuahua. Instead, she winds up juggling a menagerie of substitutes--cats, hamsters, turtles, and the like--each with its own propensity for calamity. Not all the animals in this book survive. Julie's attempts to read her parents are richly nuanced--she knows to pay more attention to silences than to the things...

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