Brave Tim agrees to look after Rosa's pets. He isn't afraid of vultures or wolfhounds, or even giant rabbits. But he isn't so sure about the gorilla, gargling in the kitchen! A comic story with a familiar setting, from Margaret Mahy.

* Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction.

* Text type - Story with a familiar setting.

* The reader response page consists of a story map to encourage children to retell the story in their own words.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship: Animals and us; Music: Animal magic, exploring descriptive sounds.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Ruby Series .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 40 pages in this book. This book was published 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Mike Phillips is the author of several books and screenplays as well as his award-winning Sam Dean novels. In 1997 he was Writer in Residence at London's South Bank Centre. Authors featuring on this anthology include Margaret Mahy, Allan Ahlberg, Dick King-Smith, Adele Geras, Michael Rosen, Linda Allen and Vivian French Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.