Title: Manners are Not for Monkeys
Author: Heather Tekavec
Artist: David Huyck
Genre: Animals / Manners / Children's / Humor / Deconstruction
Year Published: 2016
Year Read: 2016
Publisher: Kids Can Press
Source: eARC (NetGalley)
Content Rating: Ages 5+ (Some Suggestive Themes)
I
would like to thank NetGalley and Kids Can Press for
providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Now, I have read many children’s
books about manners and what constitutes as good manners and bad manners, but I
had never read a children’s book where the message about what manners is all
about is turned on its head! “Manners Are Not for Monkeys” is a
children’s book written by Heather
Tekavec along with illustrations by David
Huyck that tells the story of how a group of well-behaved monkeys ended up
getting mixed up with a group of unruly children and man, was the conclusion of
this story a doozy!
The story starts off with an old
zookeeper moving the monkeys to a cage near the picnic area where a group of
children were playing. When the little
monkeys observed what the children were doing, they started acting like the
children too, such as chewing with their mouths closed and keeping their cage
tidy. When Mother Monkey sees this, she
is wondering why her children are acting so strange and are not doing things
that monkeys normally do such as chew with their mouths open and keeping their
cage messy. One day, a group of children
came to the zoo and started doing wild activities such as roaring like lions
and sloshing through the mud like elephants and when they came to the cage of
the polite monkeys, they wondered why the monkeys were not acting as unruly as
they were and they started acting just as wild as before.
What will the zookeeper do to fix
this mess?
Read this book to find out!
Wow! This book was truly unique and amazing as I
never would have thought that I would see a children’s book that deals with the
topic of manners in a bizarre twist! Heather Tekavec has done a fantastic
job in writing this book as the humor is quite witty and I enjoyed the fact
that we have monkeys who are portrayed as being polite due to mimicking what
the children at the picnic area were doing.
It also shows a great message about how people have to be careful about
how they behave themselves around children since they are most likely to
imitate whatever activities they are doing, whether they are good or bad. While it was unusual seeing Mother Monkey promoting
bad behavior for the monkeys, it was done in a way that acting unruly is part
of a monkey’s nature and that she was only trying to get her children to behave
like how monkeys usually behave. David Huyck’s artwork is comical and
cute to look at as the monkeys are drawn in an exaggerated fashion and I really
like the images where Mother Monkey’s face contorts in an exaggerated rage as
her face turns red and her mouth goes enormously wide!
Parents should know that this
book sends a mixed message about the importance of good manners as Mother
Monkey is showing distaste for her children whenever they are displaying good
manners and that might confuse smaller children who want to learn what good
manners are all about. Parents might want to explain to their children about
the importance of good manners and that this book is merely poking fun at
manners as a whole.
Overall, “Manners
Are Not for Monkeys” is a truly fun book for children who
want a good deconstruction on manners as a whole and who love reading books
about monkeys! I would recommend this
book to children ages five and up since the mixed message about manners might
be confusing for smaller children.
