How To Give Your Cat a Bath in Five Easy Steps

How to Give Your Cat a Bath in Five Easy Steps is a humorous tale designed to delightfully frustrate readers as they go along with a young girl’s endeavor to bathe her cat. The narrator clearly goes through each step of what to do. First, “put a little warm water in the bath”. (p. 2) However, the young girl in charge of the cat’s bath time proves she needs some more specific instructions. She fills the tub to overflowing, to which the narrator says, “Put a little warm water in the bath.” (p. 3) Martz’s illustrations blend perfectly with the prose as the girl has speech bubbles that “talk” back to the narrator and readers. This makes for a very engaging story and illustration combination. The story continues, and the act of bathing this white cat becomes a catastrophe. As young ones read on, they’ll wonder: Will this cat ever get a bath?

John Martz’s illustrations are classically simple. Despite this fact, they hold detail enough to bring a richness to the story that only visual imagery can – the perforations on the rolls of toilet paper, for example, or the small clumps of dirt that fall from the planter as the cat jumps (literally) off of the page. The story can be read once as prose and again to enjoy the pictures alone, and readers will notice more with each reading.

Nicola Winstanley’s How to Give Your Cat a Bath in Five Easy Steps is a book to be enjoyed by readers of all ages – and especially by any cat owners who have ever tried to give their fickle felines a bath.