Where’s My Cat?

K-Gr 2–Playfully exercising the imagination and having fun with shape associations, Chwast transforms seemingly random objects into animals with a page turn. Thus a saw and pickle become, respectively, the jaw and body of a crocodile. In one transformation, a tennis racket turns into a turtle with the addition of a head and feet around the rim, and in another, an old gray sock makes an appropriately rumpled walrus. The magic continues until, at last, a pair of scissors ends up as the eyes and nose of that elusive titular cat. The pictures and brightly colored, hand-lettered labels are drawn in such an offhand way that even children with rudimentary artistic skills will feel encouraged to continue the game with any items that happen to catch their eyes. There is story time potential here, too, in conjunction with other challenges to perspective or expectations like (in a classic vein) Tana Hoban’s Look Book or Josse Goffin’s Oh!