rachelmanija | A Kinkajou on the Town, by Rutherford Montgomery

In case you're wondering, this is a kinkajou. They are related to raccoons, ringtails, coatimundis, and cacomistles.

This 1967 animal story concerns a kinkajou who starts his life in Mexico, where he gets captured at a young age because he got too caught up in eating a honeycomb. He becomes the pet of a Mexican boy, Carlos, but he's too good at escaping from his cage and steals honeycombs from a neighbor's bees. Carlos's parents tell him he has to get rid of his pet. Luckily, Carlos is able to pass him on to an American boy, Timothy, who's visiting Mexico with his father.

Timothy's mother is dead and his father's job requires him to travel a lot, so Timothy spends most of his life in boarding schools and is lonely. Because his father understands this, he lets Timothy keep the kinkajou, who he names Benny. But Benny's tendency to wreak havoc and escape starts causing Timothy the same sorts of problems he caused Carlos - and the boarding school doesn't allow pets...

This is a very sweet, well-observed, naturalistic animal story, with the point of view shifting between that of Benny and the humans around him. It becomes genuinely suspenseful at a certain point, when I became very invested in Benny and Timothy getting to stay together. (Spoiler: they do!)

For a white guy writing in 1967, it's blessedly non-racist; there's some mild of-the-times-ness but Carlos and his parents are pretty similar to Timothy and his father, and the Mexicans are all depicted as just normal people. Apart from the Mexican sections, it's set in the Santa Barbara area, where I used to live, and which apart from the Kinsey Milhone series, is a place I rarely see depicted in fiction. It was fascinating to see what it was like in the late sixties (a lot less developed, for one.) It has very nice illustrations, too.

It becomes a major plot point that Benny repeatedly escapes from the Santa Barbara zoo. This is not that far-fetched, as while I lived there, a capybara escaped from the zoo. It didn't get captured for several weeks, during which time it repeatedly turned up in people's gardens, ate their vegetables while they excitedly called the zoo, and then took off before the zookeepers could arrive with tranquilizers.

A Kinkajou on the Town is thoroughly out of print, but you can download a pdf - complete with illustrations - from Anna's Archive.