Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Richard Atwater

This is a Children’s Fiction book about Mr. Popper, a house painter who receives a penguin in the mail.

Synopsis:

Mr. Popper is a house painter of little money living with his wife and two children in Stillwater, Minnesota. He is happy but also restless and longs for adventure but dreams of traveling to faraway places. One day the Popper family is listening to a radio broadcast by Admiral Drake exploring polar regions, and the Admiral surprises Mr. Popper with a penguin delivered in a large box.

He names the penguin Captain Cook after the explorer James Cook. He cleans out the icebox so the penguin can sleep inside, but after a while Captain Cook’s health starts to fail due to feeling lonely. Mr. Popper writes a letter to the curator of a local aquarium, and the curator tells him he has a female penguin experiencing the same symptoms.

Mr. Popper receives his second penguin in the mail whom he named Greta, and the penguins’ bond with each other and are happy and peaceful in their environment. He installs a freezing plant installed in the basement for the penguins so that they will be comfortable in their environment which stresses the family’s budget.

Greta starts laying eggs and continues laying eggs until she finally ends up with ten eggs. Because Mr. Popper now has twelve penguins to feed, he must find a way to make money so he trains the penguins and decides to turn them into a circus act. The act becomes successful, but after a while Mr. Popper decides it is best for the penguins to go back home to the Arctic, and Admiral Drake lets the penguins go with him on his expedition to the North Pole.

The Poppers have bonded with the penguins and are sad to see them leave, but Admiral Drake invites Mr. Popper to join him on the trip. Mr. Popper sails away with the Admiral and the penguins for a year or two.

Review:

I very much enjoyed this book and loved reading about the antics of the penguins and about how the family bonded because of the penguins. Also, another important theme of this book is pursuing your dreams and that it is never too late to pursue your dreams.

“He had a nice little house of his own, a wife whom he loved dearly, still it would have been nice, he often thought, if he could have seen something of the world before he met Mrs. Popper and settled down. He had never hunted tigers in India, or climbed the peaks of the Himalayas, or dived for pearls in the South Seas. Above all, he had never seen the Poles.”