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Ugh. Okay. Buckle up.
I'd been reading some heavier books, so I decided to try out this book. It's a middle grade novel set in a zoo. When the zoo's mascot hippo dies, the main character, a thirteen year old boy, decides to investigate, suspecting it's a murder.
Overall, it was such a cute and fun story! It also had lots of fun facts about animals and how zoos work, which was fun. I laughed out loud a couple times, and it was just such a silly and entertaining story.
But.
As much as I wanted to love it, it had some issues. The biggest one was the serious fat-phobia. Like, from page one, SO many fat jokes. Mainly focused on a security guard, who is consistently referred to as Large Marge. She is perpetually suspicious of the main character Teddy, which I didn't mind having as an antagonist, but Teddy constantly compares her size to the zoo animals (rhinos, hippos, etc.). For one thing, it was just such a cop-out source of humor for kids, so it wasn't even good writing in that way. But more importantly, can we stop using body size as a source of humor?? I just wince every time I think about kids reading this and laughing at a plus-sized woman. And then using Teddy's insults against a classmate. Ugh. I loved most of the rest of the book and want to read the rest of the series, but I won't because I really can't stand this aspect of the book.
Also, it had a weird bit about little people and using them for humor? One of the "suspects" was a little person, and at first I was like 'Okay, cool, representation!' But then Teddy called him a midget several times (come on) and also the hippo was prejudiced against little people? Like it kept attacking them, which seems like a weird choice? Again, just more humor at the expense of people who have been consistently underrepresented and always the butt of the joke and worse.
So, I liked the story in general. But there were some aspects that made it bad enough that I won't read the rest of the series.