Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 2-4. It is shaped like a tall picture book, but the content is more like a graphic novel for young readers. Comic-style panels relate three episodes in the life of Boots the cat. In the first, Boots lures a line of cats off of his favorite sleeping wall with a few fish biscuits. Several of the panels show the strategies the cats use to reach the food. When their enormous pyramid of biscuit-seeking cats falls down, funny comments appear in little balloons: «How many lives do we have?» «Nine, I think . . .» «So eight, then.» The other two stories are equally goofy and laugh-out-loud funny, especially the third, which is essentially a group of cats playing one-word charades. The comic-book illustrations, in jaunty watercolors outlined in black, depict the cats in agreeably skewed fashion. With a format that forces children both to read and observe details in the drawings, this is a fun choice for improving reading and visual literacy. Susan Dove Lempke.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kitamura (Angry Arthur) wittily depicts cats as easygoing layabouts in these cinematic comics. In "Operation Fish Biscuit," the marmalade-colored Boots schemes to clear a brick wall of napping felines so he can snag a spot for himself. In play-by-play panels, Boots gets a bag of treats from a cupboard and leaves it on a nearby roof. "This is a necessary sacrifice," he mutters. When his dozing friends catch a whiff ("It must be fish biscuits!"), they form a "cat pyramid" to reach the loot, then teeter and fall with wry commentary ("Timber!" "How many lives do we have?" "Nine, I think..."). In the next story, Boots's visceral responses to a duck ("My claws are sticking out. How peculiar!... I must get it!") are interspersed with the duck's own logic ("Oh no, a cat!... I must run. As fast as I can!"). In the third tale, nine cats play a none-too-skillful game of charades. Leonardo from Me and My Cat? puts in cameos in these episodes, which are punctuated by wordless interludes showing Boots achieving surprising results when he draws and paints. Kitamura expertly storyboards the action and encloses all the written narration in conversational voice bubbles. With their big ears, dazed eyes and nonplussed expressions, his cats are anything but quick thinkers, and their neighborhood "adventures" unfold at a leisurely pace that heightens the absurd humor. Ages 5-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-4-The feisty feline from A Friend for Boots and Bath-Time Boots (both Farrar, 1998) is back, this time in three comic-strip adventures. There is "Operation Fish Biscuit," the strongest of the three, in which clever Boots regains his prized sleeping spot from the local squatter cats. He tries to learn how to swim and fly from a duck in "Pleased to Meet You, Madam Quark," and plays in a wacky game of charades organized to ward off kitty boredom in "Let's Play a Guessing Game." Each panel is clean but there sometimes are 12 or more per page. The pen-and-brush illustrations are zany and welcoming. Some pages are positively cluttered with dialogue balloons. Good readers will be undaunted and those who are less accomplished will most likely persevere because of the format and content. The humor is simultaneously sly and outrageous even on the endpapers and in between the stories.-Linda M. Kenton, San Rafael Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. 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 Horn Book Review
In this outsize book with a comic-strip format, readers meet Boots, a cat who thinks that he's more clever than he really is. In each of three fairly mundane adventures, Boots tries to outwit or get along with his fellow creatures, only to be humbled in the end. The stories, complete with wisecracks from Boots's peers, are too wordy, but Boots is an original character and Kitamura's drawings are appealingly blithe. From HORN BOOK Fall 2003, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Seldom is the text, all of which is in dozens of dialogue balloons, more than incidental in this set of feline hijinks from Kitamura (Me and My Cat?, 2000), and several episodes are entirely wordless. Between long sequences in which Boots, a marmalade-colored kitty, discovers magic in an artist's pen and a tophat, there are interlopers to lure from a favorite sleeping wall ("Operation Fish Biscuit"), swimming lessons to coax from a duck ("Pleased To Meet You, Madam Quark"), a hilarious game of pantomime to wile away a dull day ("Let's Play A Guessing Game."), and other escapades. Kitamura's comic-strip art looks simple at first glance, but he captures an astonishing range of expressions and reactions in his wide-eyed, confused-looking felines, using subtle changes of line or body language that are unfailingly catlike. Kitamura knows cats, as readers who know cats will agree-after they finish laughing. (Picture book. 6-8)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
