Children naturally side with the animals in their heartbreaking and losing struggles to survive in a diminishing wilderness. Majii and the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda offers gentle watercolor illustrations and a text which is part whimsy, part zoology, and part ecological urgency. The glimpse the reader has of the gorillas' orderly, gentle life is troubled by the harsh introduction of the realities of illegal poaching, maiming, and capture of the gorillas and of civil war, starvation, and death in the human settlements just outside the forest. It is thus more than a light-hearted picture book; the beautifully-illustrated book is part of the strategy, and the hope, that by enhancing human awareness of the fragility of the wild places on earth, human incursions into those places might be lessened.