T H E   L O W D O W N
This story retells the familiar traditional tale of the runaway pancake, with a chapatti. The book describes a range of Indian food and dishes in mouth-watering detail and ends with a fun picnic. What I love most about this book, it that while it explores multiculturalism and diversity, the setting is an urban town featuring people from lots of different racial background. Allowing children to see people of different cultural heritage within their own communities rather than as part of reading about life in 'other countries'.

L E A R N I N G   O P P O R T U N I T I E S
This book is so heavily focused on food you really must make that your first learning point, try the different foods described in the book, grind spices, chop herbs, make a curry and most importantly eat some chapatti. The end of the book features a beautiful moonlit picnic on blankets - which would be a really fun way to enjoy the food.

Beside from that the book features a fun array of animal characters that help to 'chase' or 'kick' the chapatti, which lend themselves perfectly to fun retellings of the story using home made puppets.

And finally use this as a jumping off point to study the moon, moon phases and the night sky.

L E A R N I N G   O P O R T U N I T I E S
While this book is definitely primarily a fun read it is a great way to introduce teens to speculative historical fiction, you could easily expand upon this by finding an event or idea from history and asking the 'what if' questions.

Using this as a starting point to have your child create a fully fleshed out character, think about their background, their quirks and their motive. The characters in this book each provide a full range of these themes for you to compare and contrast.

And finally obviously hippos! You can learn about the way hippos live in the wild, as well as study the impact of hippos as an invasive species (Columbia for example), try discussing what the impact of releasing hippos into your local environments would be, the effect on the eco systems. Perhaps expand on this by researching what invasive species are found in your local area and what impact this has had on the environment or native wildlife populations.