Mrs. McGee’s Coconut

By Allia Zobel Nolan, illustrated by Peter Cottrill

2009

Publisher: Tiger Tales
ISBN-13: 978-1-58925-079-6
32 pages
Ages 4-8

When Mrs. McGee buys a coconut, she discovers that opening it isn’t as easy as she’d expected. She tries everything, until she whacks it so hard the coconut rolls out her front door and bounds into town! The coconut is soon leaping into a party tent, knocking out a cat, and thundering down a bowling lane. And wherever the coconut goes, the Mrs. isn’t far behind… More fun than a barrel of coconuts…

From Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2009: A runaway coconut stirs up worldwide mischief. It all starts when Mrs. McGee, a colorful figure with wild hair and a bright flowered skirt, buys a coconut. Back home, she can’t crack it open, even with a golf club; it goes bouncing down the hill, breaking up a tea party and boinking a cat named O’Mally on the head. Just as the coconut bounces through a bowling alley, Mrs. McGee hops onto her motorbike in hot pursuit. Before she can catch it, the coconut bounces onto a ship bound for Kashmir, where a monkey snatches it and easily cracks it open by dropping it from a high branch. Back home in Tennessee, Mrs. McGee contemplates the bag of walnuts she’s just bought. The rhyming text rollicks well enough, though geographically savvy readers will wonder what happened to the coconut’s headlong career during the long voyage from Tennessee (via the Mississippi, one assumes) to landlocked Kashmir. A breezy escapade, decorated with loopily eye-catching illustrations from Cottrill, this defines “additional purchase.”