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CM . . . . Volume XXI Number 38 . . . . June 5, 2015
excerpt:
Highly Recommended. Dave Jenkinson, CM's editor, lives in Winnipeg, MB, where he once served as the personal servant of a British Shorthair, Lord Cyrus of Lithodora.
Copyright © the Manitoba Library Association. Reproduction for personal use is permitted only if this copyright notice is maintained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission.
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Table of Contents for This Issue
- June 5, 2015. |
In what the publisher describes as a "hint-and-reveal" board book, infants and toddlers are introduced to 10 different breeds of cats. While the book's opening declarative and interrogative sentences are not repeated elsewhere in the book, they are implied throughout as Ghigna introduces each cat breed via a descriptive "hint" sentence or two that is accompanied by a Bridgeman "boxed" cartoon-like illustration which reveals a potion of the cat breed under consideration. Flipping over the page provides the print and visual answer to the question, with "Calico!" completing the above excerpt. Observant toddlers will likely pickup on the fact that the name of the cat breed will rhyme with the last word in Ghigna's hint, such as "Fun to pat" / "Persian cat!" or "The only clue" / Russian Blue!". Ghigna withholds identifying the black and white cat found on the first page until the book's closing pages, when, after having named the breeds of the book's purebreds, this one is revealed to be "just a stray", a feline mutt, if you will. That fact does not deter the book's narrator, a little girl, from proudly declaring, "That cat is... Mine!".
From its alliterative title to the closing surprise, A Carnival of Cats is a fun, informative read.