The Twelve Cats of Christmas by Kandy Radzinski

Children may not be easily persuaded to explore Jolliffe’s illustrations in search of the itemized creatures and anthropomorphized plant life because the extremely busy double-page spreads make the task difficult. Unfortunately, Susan Rennick Jolliffe’s ink and coloured-pencil illustrations don’t help to fill in the missing components. Nor are some of the replaced lyrics, such as “five toads a-hopping,” particularly inventive. Andrews’ version is less successful than O’Donnell’s fun, child-centred tale because Andrews’ story lacks a strong storyline and a protagonist for children to identify with. In 1991 Elizabeth Lee O’Donnell released her version of Twelve Days of Summer, about a young girl who befriends creatures at the beach.

This is not the first time summer has been used like this. Andrews’ cumulative text describes gifts the sunshine brings each day and invites children to find each one: two goatsbeard seeds, a song sparrow nest for three, and other wonders of nature right through to 12 eggs a-hatching. Ontario author Jan Andrews adds her latest picture book to the canon of 12-days tales.

'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.From The Twelve Cats of Christmas by Kandy Radzinski to Emily Brenner’s On the First Day of Grade School, the familiar Christmas carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” has inspired lots of picture book adaptations. All ages.Ĭopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Catnip to the favorably predisposed, dressed-up doggerel to everyone else. A small format (six-and-a-half-inches square) heightens the lavishness of the details here, and each of the full-spread illustrations receives a border with a different holiday theme (holly and ivy, gold stars, paper chains, Christmas cookies, etc.). Instead, they'll appreciate Radzinski's solemn, admiring paintings of her subjects, each whisker heroically articulated, and her settings (the sleeping twosome curl up prettily in a basket with a Christmas quilt, six cats a-playing are decorously entangled with ribbon and gift wrap). These people won't care that the lines don't scan well and display little imagination ('.three climbing cats, two cats asleep, and a white cat with a red bow'), and that all the cats seem frozen in space, including the 12 cats a-leaping and the 11 cats a-racing. Although billed as a children's book, this cat-happy twist on the traditional English Christmas song is best targeted to hard-core feline fanciers of any age.