Oscar and the Mooncats

by Lynda Gene Rymond, Nicoletta Ceccoli (Illustrator)

Overview

Oscar the cat loves his boy. He also loves to climb way up where he can see everything. He jumps onto the fridge, onto the bookshelf, and onto the roof of the garage, but if he jumps just a little bit higher, his view would be out of this world. With the mightiest leap of his life, Oscar makes it all the way to the moon. Oscar makes some new friends there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547528946
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	10/22/2007
Sold by:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
File size:	43 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	5 - 8 Years

About the Author

Lynda Gene Rymond lives on Goblin Farm in Pennsylvania with her husband, the painter Charles Browning.

Nicoletta lives and works in San Marino, Italy. Awarded with the Andersen prize, "baia delle favole" as best Italian illustrator of the year in 2001, Nicoletta has also received the silver medal from the Society of Illustrators of New York.

Editorial Reviews

A cat named Oscar loves his boy, but Oscar likes to jump to high places so he can see more. In his quest, he lands on the moon. There, he plays with large, silvery mooncats. When he is tired, the mooncats urge him to drink cream from a moon crater. He is about to drink when he hears his boy calling him. The cow that jumps over the moon explains that if he drinks, he will turn into a mooncat and not be able to return to earth. Does Oscar want to return to his boy, and is he able to return to earth? The subdued colors of the stylized digital illustrations lend an other-worldly feel to the story. Fantastic as this tale is, children will feel reassured when the cat returns after his unexplained absence and will "always, always" want to come home. Reviewer: Carlee Hallman

Children's Literature - Carlee Hallman

PreS-Gr 2
Oscar the cat loves his boy, his home, and his food (both the "stinky" and the "crunchy" kinds), but he also loves to leap. One night, feeling wild, he leaps from a tree, to the top of the garage, and finally up to the moon. There he encounters mooncats that play with him and distract him from the faraway calls of his owner. When Oscar grows hungry, they invite him to drink the thick cream left by the cow that jumps over the moon. Before he can taste it, though, the cow appears and stops him, explaining that if he drinks it, he will change into a mooncat. Alarmed, Oscar leaps onto her back, returning to Earth and his boy. The mixed-media illustrations, done in acrylics, plasticine, collage, and computer graphics, are the star of this space voyage, portraying the lunar landscape in eerie, whimsical detail. The meandering text may not hold the attention of the youngest listeners, but the charming story will probably please most cat lovers, and the message of homecoming is a reassuring one. A fun, offbeat addition to bedtime story collections.
—Rachael VilmarCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

What is it about cats and moons? Here Oscar, who loves high places, takes a mighty leap from the rooftop and actually reaches the Moon-where he finds lots of silvery feline playmates and a crater filled with sweet cream left by a passing cow. Just in time he also finds out that tasting that cream would make him forget his beloved boy back on Earth. That would never do, so home he goes though, as usual, getting down is much harder than going up. Pairing a small striped cat and a lad oddly topped with short blue dreads, Ceccoli incorporates photographs, collage elements and figures resembling small plastic toys into elaborately worked digital starscapes that have a convincingly 3-D look. Young readers who wonder where cats go at night will find this an equally free-range alternative to the likes of Bruce Ingman's Night on the Tiles (1999), Helen Landalf's Secret Night Life of Cats (1998), illustrated by Mark Rimland, or David Almond's Kate, the Cat and the Moon (2005), illustrated by Stephen Lambert. (Picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews

"Ceccoli incorporates...collage elements...into elaborately worked digital starscapes that have a convincingly 3-D look." Kirkus 10/01/07 Kirkus Reviews

"[T]he appealing illustrations are in a league of their own...sure to draw children into [this] out-of-this]world adventure." Booklist 10/15/07 Booklist, ALA

From the Publisher