The Old Man and the Penguin: A True Story of True Friendship

While out walking on the beach, João (“sounds like Je-WOW”) comes across an oil-soaked penguin. Recognizing that the bird will perish if the oil is not removed from its feathers, João takes the bird home and successfully bathes it. After nursing the penguin back to health, João recognizes that he needs to return the bird to the wild. However, when João releases the penguin on a nearby island, the bird simply swims back to where João lives. And so begins A True Story of True Friendship.

Since it appears that the penguin has decided to stay, “João gives him a name: Dindim!”, and the two become virtually inseparable. However, though João treats Dindim almost like a child, Dindim is still a wild animal, one that must respond to its instincts.

Seasons change, new feathers grow.
Dindim knows it’s time to go.

Instinct draws him out to sea.
A splash,

a dive,
he’s swimming free.

Surprisingly, four months later Dindim reappears at João’s door and spends the next eight months with his human friend before disappearing again for another four months, a pattern that is repeated as their friendship continues.

Abery adds a concluding one-page “Author’s Note” in which she explains that João’s full name is João Pereira de Souza and that he is a retired bricklayer who found Dindim “while walking near his home on Proveta Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in late spring of 2011.” In addition to providing information about the Magellanic penguin, Dindim’s species, Abery explains how oil spills are dangerous to marine life. The one piece of information that young readers might want – Is Dindim still returning to João? – is not provided.

While Abery’s rhyming couplet text tells the straightforward story of how the friendship between a man and a penguin came into being, it is Pierre Pratt’s very colourful artwork, which “was rendered in pencil and digitally in Photoshop”, that visually fills in the story’s physical setting while introducing readers to a number of a secondary cast of nonspeaking characters. After reading the story to a child or a group of children, the adult reader could pose questions such as, “Where do you think João lives?” “What did you see in the illustrations that led you to that conclusion?” Pratt’s somewhat cartoon-like renderings of the book’s human figures are most appropriate to the story’s mood and could lead to post-reading questions like, “How old do you think João is? and “Who might the other people be that you see with João?”

The Old Man and the Penguin, a warm story of an unusual friendship, will be well-received by its young listeners/readers.