The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

Tommy Stubbins, a shoemaker's son in the English west country, patches up an injured squirrel and finds himself apprenticed to John Dolittle, a doctor who gave up treating people once he learned from his parrot Polynesia how to speak with animals instead. Tommy studies animal languages alongside the doctor's household, a pig named Gub Gub, a duck named Dab Dab, and Polynesia herself, before the doctor sets sail aboard his ship the Curlew in search of Long Arrow, a naturalist who vanished searching for a rare flower on Spider Monkey Island. The voyage runs through a stop in Spain, where Dolittle talks a bull out of fighting rather than fighting it himself, a storm that wrecks the Curlew, and a long search through the island's Hawk's Head Mountain that finally turns up Long Arrow alive. Once ashore, Dolittle helps the island's Popsipetel people defend themselves against a rival tribe, and grateful islanders crown him king, a position he holds only long enough to settle their conflict before quietly arranging his own escape rather than stay on as a ruler. He and Tommy sail home at last inside the shell of a giant sea snail large enough to carry them and the whole menagerie beneath the waves, arriving back in England with Long Arrow's specimens and a small fortune in pearls the islanders pressed on them as a parting gift.

Lofting tells the whole story through Tommy's plain, admiring narration, and the book reads like an old fashioned boy's adventure crossed with a naturalist's field notes, gentle rather than tense even during the shipwreck, and funnier the more time it spends inside Dolittle's crowded, talking household than during any of the actual danger. Younger readers tend to want the rest of the series once they finish this one; older readers coming to it now should be told in advance that Lofting drew some of his human characters, particularly an African prince who appears across the series, in language and caricature that has not survived scrutiny.