Cat Owners and Non-Cat Owners
Get Ready To Smile!
Author: Nicola Winstanley
Illustrator: John Martz
Publisher: Tundra Books (January 2019)
- Hardcover: 40 pages
- Ages: 3 – 7
A pink-haired little girl struggles to show each step of bathing a white cat with a pink nose named Mr. Flea. Though each step sounds easy most of us know the hard part in this equation consists of one word: cat.
Step One is to fill the bath with warm water. But if you’re a little girl you might just overfill the tub. So with a sigh, after the tub runs over, the step is reworded.
Step One Put a little warm water in the bath. The water should come up to your cat’s knees.
In the background we see Mr. Flea jumping from the shelf where he has been watching the little girl. Mr. Flea then disappears off the page.
The unseen narrator of this story assumes each simple task will be easy to accomplish.
Step one: fill the bath
Step two: put the cat in the bath
Step three: put shampoo on the cat
Step four: rinse the cat
Step five: dry the cat
But as most of us might guess, Mr. Flea has no intention of doing any of these simple steps.
The little girl soon realizes she needs more energy to complete these tasks, so she heads to the kitchen to locate some milk and cookies.
My Thoughts
What Concerned Me: Nothing
What I Liked Most: This step-by-step guide is something you can easily imagine happening. The illustrations are priceless as we see the bathroom and house turned topsy-turvy in an effort to bathe a cat. This is a book that most will find hard not to love!
Thanks to NetGalley, Tundra Books, and Nicola Winstanley for an advanced copy of this book. My opinions, as always, are unbiased.
NICOLA WINSTANLEY has always believed in the power of stories to bring comfort. She is the author of The Pirate’s Bed, A Bedtime Yarn and Cinnamon Baby, which won an honor prize for the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and was shortlisted for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award. Nicola lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
