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Customer Review: Bring this book home
The children's bookstore where I bought this book is long gone, and my son's childhood is rapidly disappearing as well. But we continue to read this book year after year, and enjoy once again the story of Garrison Keillor's prodigal cat. The rhythms and rhymes of the story are delightful, and the artwork is amazing -- at once both ethereal and down to earth. Yes, you might have to read the story to a child haltingly the first time, stopping to explain the meaning of words like promenade, abyss, sardonic, and minions. But you'll sail through it the other hundred times, so it's worth the initial effort (even if you do have to own up to the fact that you know what muscatel is). We never get tired of the story and when we get to the end, we linger for a long time on the last page -- one with no words, just a sad line of overstuffed, decrepit and dissipated felines limping home. Two of them look just like our own cats!
Customer Review: For big kids
The narrator's cat wants to go out, and he argues with it, telling her she better come back if he lets her out. When he finally lets her out, she takes off immediately to Europe and lives it up on chateaubriand and other fancy food, and develops a decidedly European purr. But her life of excess results in her eventual demise, and she ends up back home again after a year and half. The text is all told in rhyme, and the artwork is in an interesting cubist-influenced style. The book is quite sophisticated, and may go over the heads of most small people. It has about 1100 words.


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