Meet the House Kittens (Kitten Construction Company # 1) by John Patrick Green, 70 pages. GRAPHIC NOVEL.
First Second (Roaring Brook), 2018. $18.
BUYING ADVISORY: EL (K-3), EL – ADVISABLE
AUDIENCE APPEAL: HIGH
The city of Mewburg is building a new mayor’s mansion. When
Marmalade, an orange cat, shows the city planner her plans, he says she is too
cute to get the job. Determined to be taken seriously, Marmalade recruits other
talented but frustrated cats to form a construction company. They take over an
abandoned construction site and build the mansion using Marmalade’s plans, sure
that the official mansion’s plans are fatally flawed but unable to get anyone
to listen because they are just “too adorable.”
The
premise that the highly skilled cats in this story want to be judged by their
credentials and not by their appearance imparts an important lesson for
everyone. People’s fixation on cuddly cat videos juxtaposed with highly skilled
cat professionals is clever and funny. The panels are big, taking up a quarter
to a full page each, though the drawings feel a little flat at times. I just
kept wondering, however, if a culture that finds felines so adorable and cat
videos so engrossing would have developed at all if cats were our talking
neighbors, going to school and working with us? Would they still have such names
as Marmalade and Professor von Wigglebottom if they were trained and highly
skilled architects and carpenters? I’m thinking no, but ignoring that
incongruity, this beginning graphic novel, the first in a series, works well.
P.K.Foster, MLS, elementary school librarian
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