Bertha & Blink: Rumble in the Jungle
Nicola Colton
Little Tiger

As a result of her BESTest friend, a fellow inventor, stealing the design for her latest invention when he was supposedly giving her feedback, Bertha has packed up and moved far away from her city home.
She now lives in a workshop hidden high up among the trees. It’s there she happily works away at new inventions especially the Garb-o-Guise, her current project, which is near to completion. As she is adding the finishing touches there comes loud THWACKing, BOOMing, THUDDING sounds. So distracting are the sounds that she goes outside to investigate but she can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Back she goes but almost immediately there comes a RUMBLE in the jungle that scatters the contents of her workshop every which way. Determined to put a stop to the hullabaloo once and for all, she gets out an invention she’d previously been working on. Then out on her terrace its beam picks out strange but unidentifiable shapes.

Suddenly in front of her there lands a bird who introduces herself as Mona the post bird before whizzing off on her rounds. This give Bertha a brainwave. She sets to work and creates a mechanical bird that she names Blink. Blink is highly excitable but also very biddable. Away whizzes Blink, thrilled to be out in the jungle. When she returns, more rattling sounds start and that prompts Bertha to summon up all her courage and sally forth with Blink.

Can Agents Bertha and Blink finally find out where that noise is coming from? If so, what then…
The final spreads neatly set the scene for their next adventure.

With speech bubbles aplenty and lots of noises off as the story unfolds, readers just starting to fly solo, will delight in the amalgam of words and pictures Nicola Colton (author/illustrator of the Jasper and Fluff books) has created in this series opener.