Review by New York Times Review
IN DECEMBER 1960, The New Yorker ran a profile of a man whose public appearances attracted crowds that would "cause a western television hero to sway in the saddle with envy" : Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, the author of riotous, catchy children's books like "The Cat in the Hat" that had lately been flooding the nation's bookstores and libraries. In the article, the 56-year-old Dr. Seuss himself revealed his formula - "logical insanity" - while the president of Random House, Bennett Cerf, was said to have called Geisel "the only genius on his list," which included, The New Yorker reminded its readers, William Faulkner. At the time that profile appeared, the pages of a nearly finished picture book called "What Pet Should I Get?" were probably sitting in Dr. Seuss' files at his home in La Jolla, Calif. It was never released in Geisel's lifetime, but now, more than two decades after his death in 1991, "What Pet Should I Get?" is being published. It's happy news - first, because the book is, if not top-flight Seuss, a very good example of his particular genius for distilling both the spirit of his times and the timeless mind-set of children. With its galloping anapests, cockamamie creatures and kids off on an everyday adventure that turns hallucinogenic, this late arrival will slip easily into the collection that changed how Americans learn to read - Dr. Seuss books like "Green Eggs and Ham," which mowed down the teacher-approved, intellectually inert Dick-and-Jane drivel that sucked the life out of early education in the 1950s. (They may as well all have been titled "Bunny, Bunny, Bunny," as Geisel wrote in "How Orlo Got His Book," a 1957 satirical piece published in the Book Review, in which he tried to wake Americans up to the urgent need to approach children's reading in a new way.) "What Pet Should I Get?" will remind us, delightfully, that Dr. Seuss, over half a century ago, made learning to read an adventure, a club children would actually want to belong to. And, not least, he made reading aloud something parents, too, could reliably enjoy. But let's also welcome this book as another piece of evidence that we're still in shouting distance of a time, pre-Twitter, pre-Google Maps Street View, when there was some mystery around literary creation, a sense of something ultimately unknowable about authors and their daily lives, their habits, their intentions. Why did Geisel just about finish "What Pet Should I Get?" and then not publish it? His widow, Audrey - who was not married to him at the time - has said that he must have simply forgotten about it in the flurry of projects. It's true that the window in which the book was almost certainly written, the years leading up to 1960, was packed with activity for Geisel, both creative and, increasingly, commercial. He and his first wife, Helen, were busy starting a new Random House imprint for children called Beginner Books (author guidelines included a list of preferred vocabulary and a ban on anything "cute"), which by 1960 was earning more than a million dollars a year. He was also working with a plastics company to manufacture a series of snap-together animals called the Dr. Seuss Zoo. But still: I'm not buying that he - and Helen, who was intimately involved in all his work - simply forgot about it. I think there's a more interesting story here. First, though, the book itself: It features a round-faced brother and sister - his close-cropped hair is bristly on top, she has a long, wispy ponytail - who enter a pet store excited about the prospect of taking a new animal home. "Dad said we could get one./ Dad said he would pay," the boy exclaims. Inside, they confront a head-spinning lineup of choices. Also, they don't have much time - their mother has told them to be home by noon. A few pages into their predicament and again toward the end, the words MAKE UP YOUR MIND charge across the top of a two-page spread, each held aloft by a different invented Seussian creature - floppy-limbed, scruffy-coated, oddly proportioned, jubilantly weird. On one of those pages, the boy sums up the book's central point in a deceptively innocent lament: "Oh, boy! It is something to make a mind up!" That sentiment was written many years before the psychologist Barry Schwartz's 2004 book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" nailed the soul-exhaustion of late-capitalist culture and its frantically proliferating menus of options. But it will feel as fresh in 2015 as it would have in 1960, when that New Yorker profile ran 23 pages, many of them one skinny column of text flanked by ads - I counted 11 for perfumes alone. Casaque, Madame Rochas, Réplique, Shalimar, Tabu. ... Mon Dieu, it is something to make a mind up! Our two little consumer-heroes would have been born, a quick calculation suggests, in the early Baby Boom years of healthy parental bank accounts that gave children access to the expanding options of American life. At the moment the book came into being, a pet store would have offered a fertile setting for the mild existential angst that underlies any Dr. Seuss book: What pet should they get? At first the children face the easy binary of dog and cat. But, not unlike some mid-20th-century New Yorker reader alerted to the possibility that there might be a better perfume out there, the siblings quickly realize that their pet options are much more numerous - worryingly so. There's not just dog and cat but kitten and puppy, and bird and fish. There are monkeys. There's even, yes, a bunny to consider, though Dr. Seuss (pointedly) uses the proper name of his old nursery-book nemesis: '"Look over there!' / said my sister Kay. / 'We can go home / With a rabbit today!"' Then the real problems start: What other amazing animals, unknown to the children, may exist? "I might find a new one," the brother imagines, "a fast kind of thing / who would fly round my head / in a ring on a string!" Fun, yes, but wouldn't that also be asking for trouble? He reels himself back in. "Our house is so small," he admits. "This thing on a string / would bump, bump into the wall!" Their mother - who, along with their father, remains offstage, as in virtually any story in which a child's imagination must take flight - "would not like that at all." She'd probably prefer "a tall pet that fits in a space that is small." This glorious fantasy creature has spindly, spiraling ostrich legs, big hairy paws and a supersized head plume, and we see it both standing like a friendly tower above the grinning boy and compactly folded under a desk, like some ingeniously designed piece of apartment furniture. The father, for his part, comes off as a downer too. The brother decides Dad might enjoy a gigantic, furry creature called a Yent, but a Yent would need a tent, and "how do I know / he would pay for a tent?" What about taking home "one of each kind of pet"? Forget it - "Dad would be mad." Just when deliberations appear to be breaking down, reason drifts in like a breeze from an open window. "If we do not choose, / we will end up with NONE," the children realize. The story ends with the brother buckling down and choosing, apparently without regret: "I picked one out fast, and then that was that." There is a wonderful final image that will inevitably get children chattering: We see the brother and sister leaving the store with a basket, but we can't tell what kind of creature is inside - all we see are two eager, round eyes. WHY, THEN, DID Geisel leave this one in the drawer? The answer, I think, lies in the book "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish," one of Dr. Seuss' most popular, published in 1960 and featuring the same pair of siblings. (Fun fact: The brother also appears in the art Geisel provided for his 1957 Book Review piece, which suggests he began "What Pet Should I Get?" shortly before or after that, using the character he had been developing.) And while Cathy Goldsmith, who was his art director toward the end of his life, places "What Pet" sometime between 1958 and 1962, I think it was finished before "One Fish" was published in 1960. Reading "What Pet" and "One Fish" together, it seems to me "What Pet" was a kind of warm-up for the more freewheeling and imaginatively rich - the slightly more classically Seussian - book. "One Fish" has no plot, just a collection of escalating riffs on a brother and sister's life with a parade of hilarious, useful and entertaining imaginary creatures. It's as if Geisel took the Yent and the "tall pet that fits in a space that is small" in "What Pet Should I Get?" and ran with them. He picked them up, grabbed the children, and ran right out of the depressingly mundane commercial world of the pet store, far away from all the nagging worries of Mother and Dad and making the right choice. Finding himself, in late middle age, inundated by all the new demands of his own success, he ran - my theory goes - away from the pressurized world of money and responsibility and back into the joyfully liberated territory of "One Fish Two Fish." Hello, Gack! "At our house/we play out back," the narrator declares. "We play a game/called Ring the Gack." It's a book that exists outside of time, and you wish it would never end. When it does, we get the massive, comforting Zeep, with its long sinuous tail and delicately pointed hooves: "And now / good night. / It is time to sleep. / So we will sleep / with our pet Zeep." Geisel was known to be extremely self-critical, and while his books go down so easy that they risk seeming merely tossed off, his process was laborious. Each book went through many drafts; he once said he produced over a thousand pages in order to end up with 64. He would regularly dispatch any work that didn't meet his standards. But he didn't throw away "What Pet Should I Get?" When it was discovered in 2013, in a box that Audrey Geisel had set aside after his death, it was in the final stages of preparation, with words typed on small squares of paper and taped in place on the artwork. To get that far with it, he must have thought it was a fine piece of work. But he didn't publish it, either. He didn't get on a plane to New York and personally march "What Pet Should I Get?" into Bennett Cerf's office, as was his custom with each finished manuscript. Instead, I think, he did something like this: He looked over the book, and he talked it over with Helen; he thought about how much fun he had had with all its crazy creatures, and he started playing around with another book that would let the sister and brother off the hook - let them forget about their pressing pet store errand and instead hang out all day long in the commerce-free, parent-free world of "One Fish." What he chose to do then with "What Pet" was not to choose. When you find yourself caught in the jaws of an overbearing consumer culture, that's a choice, too. Why did Geisel just about finish 'What Pet Should I Get?' and then not publish it? Dr. Seuss made reading aloud something parents, too, could reliably enjoy. MARIA RUSSO is the children's books editor of the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 12, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Out of a (probably magical) box stashed in his (probably gadget-filled) office comes this posthumous offering from the mighty Mr. Geisel. Sharp-eyed readers will note the brother and sister pet hunting here are the same duo seen in One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960). This story is more plot-driven, with the kids eager to choose a pet, but they must do it by noon and only pick one. At first, the choice looks simple: a dog or a cat, right? But parrots are nice, and so are rabbits. And what about fish? When the children start thinking about a new kind of pet (one with stiltlike legs and a bush of red hair), it seems likely they will leave empty-handed. But the good doctor offers a perfect ending: the children exit with a cardboard box, only the pet's eyes visible. Readers can choose! The amusing, mostly rhyming text doesn't scan as well as Dr. Seuss' best, and the full-color art sometimes feels minimal, but there remain plenty of pleasing moments. An eight-page author's note discusses the story's origins and reminds kids that it's better to rescue a pet than get one at a shop. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: New books by beloved authors, dead or alive, get attention. For adults, the most fascinating aspect will be the author's note: how many decisions need to be made to get a 55-year-old manuscript ready for publication!--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This early Dr. Seuss work, which was found after his death in 1991 and re-discovered in 2013, stars the brother and sister from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. An extensive, informative afterword from the publisher says that Seuss often recycled story elements, and this book may have led to One Fish. Here, the narrator and his sister, Kay, have a real-world problem. They're at a pet store, and their father says they can take home only one animal: "The cat?/ Or the dog?/ The kitten?/ The pup?/ Oh, boy!/ It is something/ to make a mind up." Their imaginations soon wander in typical Seussian directions: "If we had a big tent,/ then we would be able/ to take home a yent!" (A spread shows the siblings gazing fondly out of the window at a giant, tiger-striped creature crouched under a canopy of cloth and cables.) Seuss's drawings offer plenty of offbeat surrealism (four exasperated beasts bear banners that read Make Up Your Mind), but the book also takes a sympathetic view of childhood indecision-with an appropriately indecisive ending. Ages 3-7. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-More than 20 years after Theodor Geisel's death, a newly unearthed Dr. Seuss book hits the shelves. Discovered in 2013 by Geisel's widow and his assistant, the completed manuscript and accompanying sketches were found in a box containing some of the legendary picture book creator's doodles and notes. Written sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, the tale very much reflects the culture of its time: two white siblings go to a pet store and struggle to answer the titular question. The children encounter a menagerie of real and fantastically Seussical animals. The pair bound exuberantly through each spread as they debate the merits of each creature. The rhyme scheme bounces along merrily for the most part, with the exception of a verse concerning a "yent" in a "tent," where the pattern shifts awkwardly, though it picks up steam again with the next page turn. While there is no visual adult presence in this book, readers learn that "Dad said we could have one./Dad said he would pay" and that Mother would not like a "thing on a string" that "would bump, bump into the wall!" A repeated spread depicts four potential pets holding up a banner that reads, "MAKE UP YOUR MIND." There's an ambiguous ending, and readers are left to wonder what pet the siblings finally bring home. Though the discovered manuscript included only black-and-white sketches, this finished work features the deep aqua, sunshine yellow, and vibrant red that were hallmarks of Seuss illustrations of the time period. Random House's Cathy Goldsmith, who was the designer and art director for many of Geisel's titles, worked to capture just the right palette; the good doctor would have been pleased. A note from the publisher reveals a bit of the anxiety associated with publishing a text written more than 50 years ago, "when it was common for people to simply buy dogs, cats, and other animals at pet stores. Today animal advocates encourage us to adopt.." Additional back matter includes anecdotes about a young Ted Geisel and his love of dogs, candid photos, and the story behind the discovery of this volume. VERDICT More nostalgia-inducing than groundbreaking, this picture book offers Seuss fans many familiar touchstones: jaunty rhymes, nonsense words, and the signature artwork beloved by generations of new and emerging readers.-Kiera Parrott, School Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Almost 25 years after the death of the great Dr. Seuss, a new book hits the market. "We want a pet. / We want a pet. / What kind of pet / should we get?" So begins the narrator and his sister's visit to a pet store, where they find themselves torn among a bevy of cute, furry creatures including cats, dogs, rabbits, and fish, as well as some "new things." As presented in the lengthy publisher's note that follows the story, this newly unearthed picture book likely dates to the late 1950s or early '60s and has been reconstructed from finished art and multiple iterations of draft revisions. The result is a far more satisfying experience than such other posthumous Seuss publications as Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories (2014) and The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (2011), which paired more or less finished stories with a few pieces of art. This new-old book presents a complete storyline with a pleasing balance of text and art featuring, on average, one quatrain per page. Unfortunately, it still has a fairly unfinished feel. It's hard to imagine that the notoriously finickyadmirably soauthor would have been entirely happy with the occasionally lackluster and stumbling verse. Moreover, while the illustrations demonstrate an intensifying looniness, progressing from cats and dogs to Seuss' trademark, unidentifiable rubber-limbed, mop-topped creatures, the text does not keep pace. The "yent" or the "fast kind of thing / who would fly round my head / in a ring on a string" the brother considers feel like first steps toward zaniness rather than a finished artistic vision. The concluding note likewise suffers from a lack of unity, offering an earnest exhortation to eschew pet shops for shelter adoption, a survey of the dogs in Theodor Geisel's life, and the process art director Cathy Goldsmith followed in turning the newfound manuscript into a book. Of more lasting interest to scholars than children, this genial pet-shop visit provides a tantalizing glimpse into a master's artistic process. (Picture book. 3 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
