Rena Sherwood's Reviews > Calf Capers

2002 was when things were clearly starting to wrong with the Animal Ark brand. The Animal Ark Hauntings series was stopped the previous year. Little Animal Ark had it's final book published in January 2003. And Animal Ark Pets would have it's final year. This book would be one of a handful in the Animal Ark Pets series that Scholastic in America would choose not to publish. No idea why. I think American kids would've liked it.

This was the first book in the Summer Shows trilogy, which I guess was to be a summery alternative to the Christmas or Holiday Specials.

The real author of this book was Narinder Dhami, who wrote a lot of books in the Animal Ark Universe, not just in Animal Ark Pets. It's tempting to blame Dhami for one of the reasons the Animal Ark brand started to fade, since there always seems to be at least one glaring factual error in her stories. This time, it's the color calves are when born -- and the facial hair is definitely not fuzzy. However, it's quite possible that the brand spread itself too thin, oversaturating the market, resulting in bored readers.

The title is one of the more clever ones in the series, since in this case, "capers" is used in terms of minor crimes. The criminal is dead easy for an adult to figure out, but an 8 year old might have trouble.

The quaint black and white illustrations by Paul Howard were, as usual, better than the story. This was one of his best works in the series. Although Howard often gives his animals human expressions, he didn't do so in this book. This makes his Dexter cows particularly realistic. And yes -- those cows really are that small.