Jack Preston King , I am so glad you mentioned Big Red Barn. I remember reading that aloud to my daughter 30+ years ago (approximately). On my next visit to our local library I’m going to look for that book. Over the last few months I’ve learned that my youngest granddaughter is gaga about farm animals. She has a little bucket full of little plastic farm animals that she loves to play with. For Halloween I gave her a little plastic elephant. It did not matter one iota to her that elephants are not farm animals. When we played farm she put that elephant out in the pasture right along with all the cows and pigs and chickens and sheep and donkeys. How can you not love that?
Before I gave my youngest granddaughter a little plastic elephant I read to her a children’s book from the library about why elephants can’t jump. It’s all about how their knees are built. Elephants really are incapable of jumping. In the book a young adolescent elephant came across a little boy, a monkey and a few other animals stuck on a ledge. He wanted to save them but in order to do so he had to jump up to them (or so he thought). But he could not jump. He finally realized that he could save them with his long trunk and so he did. How freaking cute is that?
When I was a kid our psychopathic mother would not allow us kids to have pets. (Germs, poop, pee, hair, etc.) So I created an imaginary pet. His name was Raja and he was a HUGE Bengal tiger. I loved him so much and we went everywhere together.
As a kid I didn’t read kids’ books. I read adult books. (And, by the way, no one ever read books aloud to me.) I read every book in our local library about the animals of Africa and India and elsewhere. I read all the Joy Adamson books about lions and cheetahs and I read every book I could find about tigers. Tigers must be one of my totem animals or something because I was utterly fixated on them.
So Jack, I am surprised by the fact that I have never come across the book you mentioned, Heart of a Tiger. I will be looking for that book also the next time I get to the library. I might also start looking for a tiny plastic tiger. All the farm animals in my youngest granddaughter’s plastic menagerie might better start getting nervous.
