The Best Monkey and Ape Books for Kids

Monkeys and apes are the animals children recognize fastest, because so much of what they do already looks familiar. A chimpanzee sulks. A young gorilla shows off, then hides behind its mother. A capuchin steals a hat and refuses to give it back. Picture books lean hard into the comedy—the swinging, the mischief, the bananas—while the real animals turn out to be even more interesting: tails that work like a fifth hand, howls that carry three miles, and families that argue and make up much the way ours do.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of 470 monkey and ape books, our editors picked twelve that cover both halves of what children come looking for: the silly, chantable read-alouds and the honest information about chimps, gorillas, and the people who study them. Start with the fixed shortlist of 12, then browse by age—bedtime zoo escapes for babies, jungle rhymes and mischief for preschoolers, and comic-strip capers, Jane Goodall biographies, and longer animal novels for independent readers.