No Monkeys, No Chocolate by Melissa Stewart and Allen Young (review)

Rain-forest monkeys like to nosh on a nice cocoa pod, but it's the goo surrounding the cocoa beans that appeals, not the beans themselves, which they spit onto the ground. Happily for chocolate lovers, discarded beans seed a new cocoa tree, thus keeping cocoa-loving primates of all ilk satisfied. Here Stewart traces the journey to chocolate treats in reverse, starting with cocoa beans, which develop in pods, which "can't form without flowers," which can't bloom without leaves, etc., all the way back to the monkeys that scatter the beans that produce the trees. It's initially an elegant framework, with each step explained in a couple of short, accessible paragraphs. However, the narrative gets tangled several times when insects come into play and explanations lengthen to fully explain the process. By the time the role of midges in flower pollenization is covered, or the role of coffin flies in controlling leaf cutter ant predation, the momentum is broken. Wong's watercolor illustrations, much in the style of Let's Read and Find Out Science series books, offer detailed close-ups of important stages of cocoa development and of the critters that various aid or impede its growth. The cartoon bookworms kibitzing in each recto corner supply additional levity but are also somewhat distracting. This title covers the same ground as Adrian Forsyth's How Monkeys Make Chocolate; however, with its shorter page count and lower reading level, No Monkeys could be a good alternate for use in many classrooms.