Frog Friends

Animal Ark Pets (UK Order) #15

by Ben M. Baglio

When Farmer Jessop's pond is filled in, the frogs are forced to find another place to live and raise their tadpoles in order to survive.

Genres: Animals

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 20, 2001

About the author

Ben M. Baglio created the brief for two series of children's books - Dolphin Diaries and Animal Ark. Dolphin Diaries features a girl and her family from Florida, who travel around the world as marine biologists and study dolphins. Animal Ark features two children who work together to help animals and solve animal-related mysteries. The books were written by commissioned writers in the UK under Baglio's instruction using the pseudonym Lucy Daniels. Each ghostwriter is named with a 'Special Thanks' on the copyright page.

Using his real name he also wrote the book series The Pet Finders Club, featuring a group of three children who search for peoples lost pets.

Reviews

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a review of the UK Hodder edition, with the fake author name of Lucy Daniels. In America, this would be published by Scholastic under the fake author name of Ben Baglio. The real author's name is Pat Posner, who wrote several books in the Animal Ark Universe. The illustrations are still by the talented Paul Howard.

I don't know what they were smoking or sniffing at Hodder, but my copy has double pages from page 91 onwards, including promotions for the previous books in the series. I originally thought this was a Super Special, although they hadn't appeared in Animal Ark or other Animal Ark spin-off series. Imagine my disappointment.

This was the only time amphibians would get pride of place in any book in the Animal Ark Universe. The title of Frog Friends was a bit misleading, since the frogs seemed to make life hard as possible for everyone. Frog Frenzy or Frog Freakout would have been much better, and more accurate, titles.

Like most Animal Ark Pets books, this had an A and a B plot. The A plot was trying to move a colony of frogs from a local farm to Welford school's new pond. The B plot was that the mother of Lilly Masters (introduced in Chick Challenge) was going to have a baby, and Lilly was ticked off about it. Considering she lived on a chicken farm that was borderline poverty level, she was totally in the right to be ticked off at the family having a new mouth to feed.

This is slightly different from most Animal Ark Pets books in that the frog colony getting wiped out was a real possibility. I did like that Pat Posner subtly taught a lesson that people should never mess with nature. She didn't lay it on thick, though. It would've been nice to see that the farmer who filled in the frogs' pond got run over by a tractor or was mangled in a combine harvester. That would've been poetic justice.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mandy tries to move frogs to her schools pond.

[Taylor Troncin]

Loved this series when I was younger. Still a huge animal lover and would like to read the rest of this series!

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

7/10.