The Anagranimals and The Wishing Well Book Review

When I saw a tweet looking for bloggers to review a new children's book, The Anagranimals and The Wishing Tree By Leith Moghil, I tweeted a reply quickly.

As you know, we LOVE books here. Reading is one of my most favourite things although I don't get as much chance to read now as I would like to. Happily Megan and Ben both seem to be following in my footsteps with their love of books.

When the book arrived it was beautifully wrapped in pink tissue paper, sealed with a couple of red heart stickers. As we opened it, both Megan and Ben were instantly drawn to the illustrations. They are just beautiful, Ian King, who has illustrated the book has done an amazing job. The animals look so lifelike, so like real animals, but so friendly too.

Of course we had to sit and have a read straight away. I wondered whether Ben would lose concentration as the book is aimed at a slightly older children, aged 5-9 years, but no, he was hooked!

The book is about six animal friends who all live in a mysterious land called Pogo Bogo.
There is Heidi the Hippo, Pedro the Pig, Lancelot the Lion, Ebenezer the Elephant, George the Giraffe and Rocky the Rhino.

One day whilst playing hide and seek they come across The Wishing Tree, a magical tree that will grant them a special wish!
They decide to wish for the best parts of their favourite animals!
When they awake the next day they have all magically transformed into unusual animals!
Rocky has become a rhino-parra-rog, Pedro is now a pig-orilla-roo, Ebenezer is a ele-zeb-zee, George is gir-osti-duck, Heidi is a hippo-croco-puss and Lancelot has become a Leo-tiga-mur!
They have an amazing time trying out all their new animal body parts and finding out what they can do.
The story concludes with the animals all going along to thank the Wishing Tree for his wish and him asking them to visit his cousin, the Weeping Willow who lives in the Serpent Mountains.

This ends this book, but leaves it open for the second story of The Anagranimals and the Weeping Willow. (And I hope it is published soon as Ben in particular, (and me!) are dying to read it and finds out what happens!)

When I asked Megan what she had liked about the story she told me that it was a 'proper' story, with lots of detail. She is quite into the description in stories at the moment and liked the way the setting was described in the book.

Ben really enjoyed looking at all the pictures of the animals and talking about what animals they were made up from.

You can find out more about the Anagranimals here.


We were sent a copy of this book for review, all opinions are our own.