review

CUTE EMERGENCY – TONY HEALLY

By karen t. brissette

Posted on December 27, 2015

Cute Emergency by Tony Heally
My rating: 3/5 cats
One Star

in order to compete with “the internet*” in the awww cute animals game, you really need to bring something tremendous to the party. you can’t just make rice krispie treats and expect padma to wet herself.

and this book in particular, whose concept is using adorbs animals as cheap therapy/medicine to chase away the blues, needs to at least be cuter than a dog food commercial.

it’s a great premise, and i like the way the book is sectioned off into escalating degrees of need and sadness from emergencies low/moderate/high/severe/extreme, but the cuteness of the animals doesn’t seem to vary with the size of the emergency. yes, all animals are cute, but there’s a clear difference between

and

(neither of these are from the book)

and i find it hard to believe that in the “extreme cute” section, you would include a yak, which is a moderate emergency if ever i saw one. “cute” is subjective, sure, but no one has ever thought that an adult yak is the cutest animal of all time**.

not when puppy piles exist.

if you’re going to establish a concept, you need to follow through and work at making your concept effective rather that just a superficial and arbitrary distinction, especially with a book like this which requires no more effort than a halfhearted google image search and securing some permissions. go the extra mile! don’t be lazy! unless you’re a dog

part of the problem is variety. the animal kingdom is vast, but this book is very dog-and-cat centric with barely any exotic cuties.

there are 28 pictures of cats

72 pictures of dogs

5 pictures that feature a cat and dog together

and one of a dog that thinks it’s a cat

and it’s not like these animals aren’t cute. i mean come on

but diversify!

there are sections with four pages of cats in a row. or four pages of dogs, where one of those four pages has four insets of dog pictures. mix it up, man. cute comes in all shapes, not just “pet store.”

there are only 3 other species that show up 5-or-more times: monkeys (into which category i am rudely lumping all manner of apes n’ such)—5, hedgehogs—6, and (the biologically unspecific) bunnies—6.

the biggest problem with this book is that there are ZERO red pandas even though they are the most medicinal of all.

and only one raccoon

and one koala

and while it’s fresh on my mind—there is also an overreliance on animals sleeping, even though yeah yeah yeah animals sleeping are pretty cute

but there’s only so many pictures of sleeping (mostly) dogs n’cats you can look at before you want to wrest editorial control away from the makers of the book and say THIS IS HOW YOU SHOWCASE THE MARVELS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, MOFO!

because an even more serious problem is the inclusion of animals in clothes. leaving aside my own personal feelings on the matter, from an unbiased editorial standpoint, it’s just cheap. considering how cute animals are all on their own, this seems unnecessary. and not even particularly cute.