Amelia Bedelia finds more trouble than a barrel of monkeys in the latest volume of this long-standing series. When a nasty case of flu causes Amelia to miss a class trip to the zoo, she decides to re-create the field trip so as not to feel left out. No zoo? No problem! With the help of friends, Amelia soon has an increasingly exotic menagerie in her backyard, but she can't quite figure out who keeps eating all of the bananas. Avril's whimsical illustrations nicely enhance the exuberant nature of the text in this sure bet for returning fans.

Amelia Bedelia misses the class field trip to the zoo, so she organizes a backyard zoo with her classmates' pets. In this fourth installment about the young Amelia Bedelia, literal interpretation of idioms and wordplay take second place to the plot, making it more successful as a chapter book than previous entries but less closely related to the original picture books.

Gr 1-3 Amelia and her friends build a zoo in her backyard (with stuffed animals) in this fourth book in the series chock-full of zany black-and-white illustrations.