I absolutely completely adored this story, every page was a surprise and so funny. I picked up this book because I hate hiccups and I was curious to find out what exactly in the world could be so wonderful about them. Honestly the cover did not even occur to me to wonder why there was a hippo present at all. But the young boy does get the hiccups in the library and he just thinks that is the funniest thing ever because you have to be quiet in the library, so he is told by his sister to hang upside down and drink water which he finds even funnier because you are definitely not aloud to do that in the library. So the boy goes outside to hang upside down from a tree where he finds a hippo. The rest of the story is this journey that the boy, his little sister and the hippo take through town along with all of their library books. At one point his little sister ends up on the top of the library, the hippo burps really loud and the librarian falls from the sky onto the hippo. Eventually once all the library books are returned to the library the little boy is able to prove to his mother that he is responsible enough to have his own library card, which he can then use to rent books to read to his new hippo friend.

This story is all about cause and effect as well as simply taking care of your library books. My favorite part of the story is the end where it states very important library rules like: Do not feed your library books to strange animals, do not get books wet and especially keep them out of the toilet, always thank the librarians, and do not eat strawberry ice cream off of your books.

Additionally I loved looking at the drawings of the books on each page because they each had a title and I enjoyed finding out what hidden books where throughout. Like: 'The Anatomy of a Hiccup' or 'Don't Hiccup in my Soup' and 'Grandma's Wish'. ( )

The title of the story made me laugh right away and that it was got my attention to read it. Overall the book is very silly and compares the advantages of having a sister to having a hippopotamus. The sequential order in this story having one activity lead to another is great and makes it easy to follow. The moral of the story is though that if you lose you library card you may be showing to someone that you are not responsible. The advantages of having a library card means you can take out books and read them whenever you want and that is a huge responsibility.