A memoir by Benjamin Mee, tells the true account of how the author and his family used their life savings to buy a dilapidated zoo, replete with 200 exotic animals facing destruction, in the English countryside. Mee, along with his children, had to balance caring for his wife, who was dying of brain cancer, with dealing with escaped tigers, raising endangered animals, working with an eclectic skeleton crew and readying the zoo for a reopening.

An unobservant zookeeper is followed home by all the animals he thinks he has left behind in the zoo.

A librarian named Mavis McGrew introduces the animals in the zoo to the joy of reading when she drives her bookmobile to the zoo by mistake.

The animals at the Franklin Park Zoo love their kindhearted caretaker, Griffin Keyes. Finding himself more comfortable with a lion than a lady, Griffin decides the only way to get a girl in his life is to leave the zoo and find a more glamorous job. The animals, in a panic, decide to break their time-honored code of silence and reveal their biggest secret: they can talk! To keep Griffin from leaving, they decide to teach him the rules of courtship,...

Skipper and his penguin pals have their hands full solving a whole bunch of problems, including a pigeon's planned attack on the visiting zoo commissioner, sightings of a flying orca, combating a poison dart frog, and the unstoppable growth of a green blob called Jiggles.