Book Review of Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag

 

1.      Bibliography

Gag, Wanda. 2006. Millions of Cats. Puffin Books. ISBN: 9780142407080.

2.      Plot Summary

In this story we follow an old woman and old man who are lonely and looking for a cat to keep them company.  The old man finds hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions of cats that follow him home.  The old man and woman cannot keep all of them and decided to keep the prettiest one.  The cats fight over who is the prettiest until only one cat is left.  The book shows the reader that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing and looks don’t mean everything.

3.      Critical Analysis

In this book, we have an old man and old woman who are lonely and looking for a cat to live with them.  Looking at the text in the book, the font used is different than what you are used to seeing and it gives the book an older look to it.  For a children’s book the pages are full of text and there is even one page with only words, which could be a bit much for small children.  The book is very long and may lose the interest of children who are not getting the bigger picture of the book.  The book has a good moral story for children to see that it is not always best to be the most beautiful and staying humble to yourself is better. 

The illustrations are beautiful and give the reader so much detail, with the rolling hills and details in the trees and house.  The whole book is in black and white, which is beneficial for children to see different ways to illustrate books and stories.  The story is quite old and gives you the feel of a folktale when you read it. 

This may take an adult talking through the book with children for understanding of the story to take place, but I think kids will love and be in disbelief that there could be so many cats in one place, which leads to the question, where did the cats come from in the first place?

4.      Review Excerpt(s)

“An American classic with a refrain that millions of kids love to   Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.” (GoodReads)

5.      Connections

*I would use this to talk about conversation text and quotation marks with students because there are a lot of different conversations in this book.

*Compare this book to other books from the same time period to see how they are similar or different.

*A book in this time period: The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco and William Nicholson (Illustrator).