More Valley Cats by Gretchen Preston
My rating: 3/5 cats
i liked this valley cat book slightly less than the first, but do keep in mind that i am reviewing this as an old childless lady and not as someone with any connection to its target audience.
this book introduces five new cats to the valley cat clan. (well, four—they find three orphaned kittens, which are distributed amongst the families, but one of those kittens—the calico—is never mentioned again, which made me sad because i do so love calicos.)
where did you go, little calico??
this book, like the first in the series, is full of both adventures and life lessons. however, i thought the didactic elements in this one were a little forced—they weren’t inserted as effortlessly as they were in Valley Cats. for example, boonie the cat knows an awful lot about astronomy and will just info-dump his knowledge to his rapt cat-audience:
“Shooting stars, also known as falling stars, are not stars at all. They are meteors. As the Earth travels on its annual journey around the sun, it encounters clouds of debris in space left from passing comets. The clouds consist of ice crystals and rocks made up of various minerals. The rocks, when pulled by gravity into the Earth’s atmosphere, become meteors. They fall faster and faster, heating up so hot they light on fire… Every year in mid-August, the Earth passes through a known cloud of space debris. For the next few nights, weather permitting, we will be able to see hundreds of shooting stars. This time of high activity is called a meteor shower. Most of the meteors burn up long before they hit the ground. What we will see tonight is happening high above us. You need not worry about getting hit by one.”
which is just a lot to process in a bedtime story. i think it’s great that there’s a teaching element to these books, but it just comes across a little clunky here, as opposed to before, where the facts about the natural world were better woven into the adventure narrative. no one likes a know-it-all, boonie!
and later, a (human) character states:
I am not familiar with pasties,” Winslow admitted. “Please tell me everything you know about them.”
and the other human does. and he knows A LOT about pasties, as it happens.
the information is interesting, if you are into food history (and i am), but it just doesn’t sound natural.
there are also lessons to be learned of a less academic and more social nature. the introduction of new cats leads to problems of jealousy and friend-sharing. it’s an important lesson, but it occurs two times in this volume, and it seems redundant to revisit the theme twice in such a short book. i mean, it’s fine and laudable for the kiddies with their still-blooming socialization bits to be reminded that we need to share with others in this life. but me, i know how to share, and i am actually wicked good at it, even when it is cadbury mini-eggs, so i would have liked more adventure instead of more tales of overcoming jealousy.
this volume also introduces a blind (human) character, which i thought was handled very well and was a good example of how the teaching-bits could be seamlessly contained within a story, as winslow explains to the cats how he navigates his new surroundings and compensates for the loss of his vision.
i liked the winslow stories very much, and the final story, which emphasizes the skills of courage, self-reliance, and thinking outside the box in a really charming way.
my only other tiny complaint is a sort of inconsistency regarding the realities of the animal kingdom. there’s no hesitation in this book in asserting that the orphaned kittens were most likely orphaned because a fox ate their mother, but in a few other stories, the valley cats encounter a squirrel and some mice, and in one of the mouse stories, the cats lure the mouse out of the house with a trail of crumbs instead of—you know—devouring it. neither the squirrel nor the mice are given cutesy squeaking voices or anything, so it’s not like they would be eating a fwiend, and while it’s a cute little story, it’s not consistent with the already-established admission that sometimes nature will eat other nature. i dunno, i just think you can either write a book where animals behave like disney or you can write a book that’s actually about nature, and this one seems to want to have it both ways, which can be confusing. i imagine.
but it’s still great, and i am looking forward to reading the third volume: Valley of the Cats: Earth, Wind and Sky
also—new cat (and dog) cards!
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