This just made my day – it turns out that my grandmother’s gorilla wasn’t the only one who flew across a living room.
In Anthony Browne‘s Little Beauty, inspired by Koko, we meet a very sad signing gorilla. He lacks a very important thing: a friend. So his keepers bring him an adorable little kitten, named Beauty. He and Beauty do EVERYTHING together. Including swinging from a ceiling light, with a picture of Icarus hanging on the wall behind them. (The vine print furniture is a nice touch.) But one night the TV breaks…
The illustrations make this book, particularly the vivid facial expressions. Everyone from the cat to the stumped zookeepers to the gorilla conveys emotion. The gorilla’s face is particularly mobile, stretching from sadness to bliss and even anger. The ending could be sweet or ambiguous, depending on how you look at it, but I think maybe a certain character understood why the TV got broken…
Browne also wrote Gorilla, which is touching.
So yeh – flying gorillas!
