My niece liked Never Smile at a Monkey more than my nephew did. She liked that it told you all kinds of facts about animals that pertained to how they protect themselves, and this *was* interesting and educational, even for me. I had no idea that platypuses have poisonous spines on their back legs!Never Smile at a Monkey was a bit intense for my little nephew, though. Many of the paragraphs about the animals ended by implanting the idea of "serious injury, or even death to humans," and this was maybe a bit dire to a four year old who doesn't know that hippos, for example, don't naturally live in his back yard. So this was an interesting book, but it does have a good, scare-the-crap-out-of-a-kid factor to it. Probably best to not read it to kids under about the age of seven or eight.