By Polly Faber
A busy, sensible city girl befriends a shy tapir who's most definitely not a pig — in four little stories, one per sitting.
Mango Allsorts is good at all sorts of things — karate, chess, being sensible. Then one day she finds a tapir sitting in the middle of a very busy street, refusing to budge. His name is Bambang, he is emphatically not a pig, and he's a bit lost and a bit scared of the big city. Mango takes him home, and the two become the unlikeliest of best friends across four short, cozy adventures.
The book is really four separate little stories, each one starting and finishing in a single reading, with Clara Vulliamy's pictures splashed across nearly every page. That makes it a perfect five-minutes-a-night book — you read one adventure, you stop, and nobody's left hanging. It's warm and funny and just gently exciting, the kind of first chapter book that convinces a picture-book child that longer books can be cozy too.