and Tango makes Three

And Tango makes Three
by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson

Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
April 26, 2005
32 pages

reading level: ages 4 - 8

Two male penguins in New York City Central Park Zoo hatch an egg. Yes, two males. The book is cute but simplistic. It is a "picture book" geared for kindergarten and I can see why some parent's are in an uproar. I also don't see what the big deal is. Male and female Chintrap penguins look the same so if you see a couple, there is no way to tell it is male/male. The two boys did all the mating rituals that the other couples did, there is no way the zookeeper could have been mistaken.

You can only assume that the pair stayed together through more than one breeding season, otherwise why would they try to hatch a rock. Only after seeing the boys try this, did the zookeeper help. He gave the pair an unhatched egg from another couple that did not do well when taking care of two eggs. He DID NOT take another couple's egg from them, but instead relieved them of having to care for two eggs and possibly losing both.

Full color, short & simplistic, looks to be a bit bigger then legal size paper. I don't know what kind of media happened during/after the hatching, but really, no matter what your view on this is, the penguins are together, the zookeeper did a good thing and baby Tango survived when maybe she would not have. We should not throw away our children (the egg) when there is another option for them.

edited to add picture & publish info, "Wow, a comment already!", and... This book is for my banned/challenged category of the 999 challenge. I picked it because it was a children's book and I just love children's books. The librarian my children had in elementary school would not have taken this out of the school library but she may have placed it with "penguin" instead of the picture books. Usually the kindergarten kids stayed with the picture books. This is what she did with a Holocaust picture book.