Jungle Drums

“Every year the Other Animals hold a Grand Parade with prizes for the most beautiful. The Warthogs don’t even bother entering — mud wrestling isn’t on the program.”
From the creator of the beloved illustrated classic, The Waterhole, comes a story about finding inner beauty, and learning that our wishes are not always fulfilled in ways we expect.
Ngiri Mdogo is the smallest warthog in a big family of African warthogs. They’re not very pretty, but they can put on a great mud-wrestling contest! Unfortunately the beautiful animals across the river don’t appreciate mud wrestling — they have a grand parade that shows off how stunning they look, and they tease the warthogs for being so ugly.
Ngiri wishes he wasn’t so small because he is tired of being teased, and he wishes that Warthogs weren’t so ugly and the other animals weren’t so pretty. When Ngiri is given a set of magic drums he is sure his wishes are about to come true, but the way his problem is eventually solved is not as he expects — and everyone learns a lesson along the way.
Graeme Base’s imagination, enthusiasm, energy, and sense of humour will astound you yet again in this gloriously illustrated book. A wonderfully child-friendly picture book with fable-style storytelling perfect for reading aloud or as a first reader.
In true Graeme Base style there is an added surprise at the end: a fun look-and-find element in the illustrations. The stunning African scenery, the African magic and fantasy element, and the warm and endearing characters will draw the reader in, and the story culminates in a wild, funny, andvisually impressive grand finale over several spreads that proves that Graeme Base just keeps getting better and better with every book.

Publishers Weekly

In this disconcerting fairy tale, a young warthog uses magic bongos to cast spells on his vain jungle neighbors, and the results are not pretty. Ngiri Mdogo, literally "little warthog" in Swahili, hates being the runt of the forest. " `No spots?' laughs Chui the Leopard. `No stripes?' whinnies Punda Milia the Zebra." Ngiri Mdogo complains to Old Nyumbu the Wildebeest, who lends him two special drums but warns that the outcome is "not always as you expect!" The first time he beats these "jungle drums," the pompous beasts turn neutral beige and lose their identifying features; the elephant no longer has its trunk, nor the rhino its horns. Their markings appear on the other warthogs (not the hero), who proudly parade around the muddy riverbank. Ngiri Mdogo plays the drums again, but the warthogs only transform further into giraffes and zebras, the leopard gets the rhino's gray skin and the elephant acquires leopard spots. Base painted naturalistic, if anthropomorphic, beasts in Animalia, but here he plays mix-and-match with exaggerated, garish cartoon creatures until a third wish restores normality. The book's most engaging aspect is its hide-and-seek game; chameleons, birds and snails flicker in the greenery, and semi-transparent portraits of the wildebeest appear in every spread. The forest yields details, but readers may be put off by the unpleasant discombobulations that beset the main characters. Without the alphabetic format of Animalia and the visual interplay of The Water Hole, the story feels like a hollow vessel for delivering a clich d message. Ages 4-8. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Graeme Base is one of the world’s leading creators of picture books. Animalia received international acclaim when it was first published in 1986 and it has achieved classic status with worldwide sales of more than two million copies. Base’s most recent picture book, The Water Hole, an ingenious fusion of counting book, puzzle book, storybook and artbook, has been published in Australia, the USA, Canada, Italy, France, Denmark and the UK. Base lives in Melbourne with his artist wife Robyn and their three children.