69. Codes Bananas by David Walliams

For some reason, my daughter insisted that I read this book.  She plows through graphic novels and is a decent reader but so far hasn't seemed super enthusiastic about any books yet.  Her close friends, the twins, loved this book and gave it to her for her birthday.  It may be that she just doesn't express enthusiasm about things (she tends to be pretty stonefaced during movies), I just don't know.  I would have read this book in a day were it in english, but the twist is that she read it in french.  I can read french fairly well but it is is not unconscious for me as reading in english is and thus requires concentration.  So even a kids book like this is a real chore.  Furthermore the style of these books is to have all kinds of cartoony typefaces in different sizes that I just found kind of annoying (old man yelling at cloud here).  So this took me weeks to read!  

A corollary of having to read french consciously is that I also don't internalize the story.  It's all very removed.  So to be honest, I can't give this book a fair review.  It's a really fun adventure about a young boy in London during the blitz (orphaned by a Nazi bomb) who lives with his grandmother and has so far avoided being sent out to the country.  His uncle works as a guard at the zoo and his great joy is going there to be with the animals.  One night when he sneaks out to the zoo (after he is caught there by the asshole security guard and forbidden to come back by the pretentious and rigid zoo manager), his grandmother and her house are destroyed by another Nazi bomb, he is caught up in a wild adventure trying to save Gertrude the Gorilla.  It's quite wild and over the top, utterly unrealistic and I suspect a lot of fun.