Bitter Bananas by Isaac Olaleye, illustrated by Ed Young- Fiction/Freebie

Bitter Bananas by Isaac Olaleye is a wonderful and interesting book for people of all ages. The book is written in a repetitive style that makes it easy for all students to comprehend, but the illustrations and varied text placement keep the readers interested. In this book, a young boy, Yusuf, lived in an African village. He loved to drink palm sap and would sell it at the market to help his family. However, someone started taking his palm sap! After hiding at night he found that it was baboons that were drinking his palm sap. Yusuf came up with several ways to try stopping the baboons from taking the palm sap. He tried charging out of a bush and yelling at them, hacking down the trees near his palm tree so they could not leap onto his tree, scaring them with a scarecrow, and tricking them into thinking a gourd was a person. None of these plans worked! Finally, Yusuf bought calabash bowls, ripe bananas, and palm sap from the market. He mixed palm sap, ripe bananas, and green juice from wormwood leaves in the calabash bowl. Yusuf placed the bowls at the foot of the tree and the baboons came to eat it. They never came back again!
Despite being a juvenile fiction book, this story provides children with a glimpse of life in Africa. Students who are interested in Africa might want to read this book. There are wonderful illustrations, and a few cultural traditions are mentioned and drawn. Also, this book contains animals, making it enticing and exciting for many children. This book would be great for students who love animals. Even if the upper elementary students feel too old to read this book, it provides an excellent gateway for a creative invention project. Teachers can have their students design ways to prevent the baboons from stealing the palm sap! This will allow students to be creative, share their ideas with the class, and compare their ideas to those in the book! This book would be excellent for lower readers because it is a pretty easy read, but it is still interesting. Bitter Bananas is an excellent choice for any teacher to use in his or her elementary classroom!