Hippos Go Berserk Book

This review is so hard for me to write not just because I'm pre-literate but also because I really wanted to like the book. But I just found some inconsistencies between the text and pictures that were difficult to resolve... and ultimately felt disappointed that not all the hippos go berserk.

Let's start at the beginning:
1 hippo, all alone
calls 2 hippos on the phone.
3 hippos at the door
Bring along another 4.

You might imagine that the pictures should show 1 hippo then 2 then 3 then 4... but that is not the case! The first hippo, I will refer to him as the host hippo, is almost always pictured along with the new hippos! So when there are 3 hippos at the door, the host hippo is there to greet them -- thus there are actually 4 hippos portrayed! The host hippo is almost always pictured and throws off the hippo count on each page. Additionally, with some of the bigger numbers (e.g., 7 or 8), hippos are often portrayed in pairs where one hippo occludes another. This makes it difficult for me to distinguish whether there are two hippos or one. How is an infant supposed to get a leg up in this crazy kind of world?

Additionally, 9 hippos come to work the party as servers... when the hippos are going berserk, it would be inappropriate for them to join in the frenzy... so they really are trying to hold it together rather than "playing with great delight." This suggests a class difference amongst hippos that is being ignored as the author exclaims that "ALL the hippos go berserk!" (emphasis mine) in the plot's climax.

Sandra Boynton does a masterful job of pulling us into this frenetic hippo world. But the gripping story with its symmetric addition and subtraction of hippos does not make up for the deeply flawed and clumsy literal portrayal of the actual number of hippos going berserk.