With Cat for Comforter

Rating:
Summary: cute book for cat lovers, but not for the bradbury fan
Review: It's a very cute book with good illustrations. A good gift for teen or adult cat lovers or for cat lovers to read to cat loving children. Generally not for Ray Bradbury fans as it is nothing like his other writing.

Rating:
Summary: A slight companion to the dog book
Review: Let's get one thing straight: Ray Bradbury is one of myfavorite writers. His novel _Something Wicked This Way Comes_ is oneof my personal favorites. I have read Bradbury stories aloud to live audiences, and performed a couple of them from memory as well.

But Bradbury is not much of a poet. On the spectrum from Eliot and Stevens down to McKuen, he comes much closer to the latter. Bradbury writes rich, poetic prose which works as such most of the time, but his poems are rarely more than mildly interesting or pretty thought-rambles.

So it is with this little book, a companion to "Dogs Think That Every Day Is Christmas" -- both being Hallmark-card-ish tributes to their respective domestic quadrupeds. (Lest you think me a non-animal lover, I hasten to add that I live with a dog and two cats, myself.) The illustrations by Louise Reinoehl Max are nice enough, but hardly inspired.

This inexpensive bauble is suitable only for Bradbury completists (which includes me -- I ordered one from Amazon, after all), or perhaps for people who are VERY sentimental about felines. An introduction briefly describes some of the more than three dozen cats who have shared Bradbury's life.

I'm glad to have a copy of this book to fill out my collection, but I doubt I'll crack it open again.

Rating:
Summary: For cat lovers and others
Review: Not being a particular Bradbury fan, I wasn't sure about this book when someone gave it to me for--of all things--a baby gift! But we are a four-cat family, so we read it to our infant son, and, now that he's two and a half, it has become one of his very favorite books (honored alongside Green Eggs and Ham and My First Truck Board Book). It has introduced him to "adult" language ("big words") with beautiful rhythm as well as aesthetic illustrations in a context he knows well. And for Mom and Dad, it has well fulfilled the advice not to give your child a book you don't want to read a hundred and fifty thousand times. Recommended for children and adults of all ages!