By Richard Atwater, Florence Atwater
A house painter who dreams of the South Pole ends up with twelve penguins living in his living room.
Mr. Popper paints houses all day and dreams about the poles all night. Then a real explorer mails him a real penguin, and one penguin becomes two, and two become twelve, and soon the whole downstairs is an icebox full of birds and the Poppers are training a penguin stage act to pay for all the fish.
This is the softest possible landing for the whole idea of the trail: a wildly imaginative story with both feet on the ground and not a drop of magic in it. Everything odd here has a plain explanation — a penguin came in the mail, so now there are penguins. The chapters are short and every one has a laugh in it, so a child who is just getting the hang of chapter books can finish it feeling like the funniest person in the room. It's from 1938 and reads a little old-fashioned, in the cozy way, not the confusing way.