I’ve always found cats a bit mysterious. From a non-cat owner’s perspective, all of these books have amusing depictions of cat ways.
Feathers for Lunch, written and illustrated by Lois Ehlert
Age range: 18 months and up
A cat goes bird hunting but her bell keeps scaring them off.
Kitten’s First Full Moon, written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes
Age range: 18 months and up
Kitten sees the full moon and thinks it is a bowl of milk. She chases it and never quite catches it.
Ginger and the Mystery Visitor, written and illustrated by Charlotte Voake
Age range: 18 months and up
A roaming cat finds lots of people to feed him, despite having two square meals a day at home.
Magic Thinks Big, written and illustrated by Elisha Cooper
Age range: 2 years and up
Magic the cat thinks about his next move. Options include napping, checking the fridge for food, and having blueberry pie with some bears.
Wabi Sabi, by Mark Reibstein. Illustrated by Ed Young.
Age range: 3 years and up.
Wabi Sabi, a cat, goes on a quest to find out the meaning of her name.
The Tale of Tom Kitten, written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter
Age range: 3 years and up
Tom Kitten and his sisters sully their clothes, leaving their mother affronted.
Catwings, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Illustrated by S.D. Schindler
Age range: 4 years and up
This is the first book in the Catwings series. Four kittens, born with wings, fly from their dangerous life in the city and make their home in the country.
“The Alphabet Keeper” is the story of an alphabet that has been held captive–caged and in the dark–by a mean alphabet keeper. The letters make a brave escape through an open window one day while she’s cleaning the cage. Though the alphabet keeper tries over and over to catch them, the letters outwit her by doing things like turning her plans into plants and her hedges into edges. They eventually fly to the moon (by turning a rock into a rocket and a moo into a moon), “and the alphabet keeper will never get them back.”
As a former geologist I’m overly sensitive to intimations that dinosaurs and people overlapped. I have this fear that when kids read books featuring children who find a newly hatched dinosaur or dinosaurs who give their human parents goodnight kisses, they’ll start buying into the idea that the dinosaurs went extinct because humans didn’t invite them onto the Ark. The fact that no person has ever seen a living dinosaur means that any books featuring the two species have to somehow convey a sense of fantasy, which can be tricky when you’re writing for toddlers.
We’re reading in themes these days, or at least in two themes: zoos and dinosaurs. We lucked out again on the zoo front by finding “A Zoo for Mister Muster” at the library last week. “A Zoo for Mister Muster” was published almost 40 years ago. I don’t remember reading this one as a kid, but I read a lot of books that had a similar feel. The peachy tones overlain by sketchy black lines are like the words to nursery rhymes: You might have forgotten them after the 6th grade, but they come back in a flood of familiarity as soon as you’re re-exposed to them with your child. When I read this one to Zadie, I kind of feel like I’m sharing a bit of my childhood with her.
There are a lot of Zadie’s books that I love, but few that I find myself relating to as an adult. Yes, “
This book is currently on Zadie’s list of haunted items in our house. We’ve witnessed the posession of toys before, but this is the first time it has happened to a book. I usually have no idea why a once-beloved object (a benign plastic boat, a green monkey, a flashcard with a baboon on it…) becomes taboo. In the case of “Boo Hoo Bird” I have a guess.
During the one year I spent living in San Diego, the lack of winter didn’t bother me, but the lack of rain was really unsettling. As an east coaster, I’d never realized how much I relied on rainy days as an excuse to do quiet things inside and work through blue thoughts. Rather than being a shining respite from the dreary grey springs of Cape Cod, the perpetual sunshine in Southern California seemed an affront to my occasional need to wallow. Wong Herbert Lee’s “Who Likes Rain?” captures the range of feelings we, and other creatures, experience on rainy days–from boredom to contemplation and elation.
We first discovered Emily Gravett’s “Monkey and Me,” a couple of months ago and fell in love with her style. I’m almost positive that if we owned a copy of it Zadie would want to read nothing else. So we just read it at the library–several times on each trip–and in between trips we talk about looking for it at the library and reading it again. Given the level of obsession that has surrounded “Monkey and Me” at our house, I hesitated a bit before checking out “The Odd Egg” this morning. It’s only been 12 hours, but I think “Monkey and Me” might have some competition.
