This was another Read Aloud Revival (Sarah Mackenzie) recommendation. My kids (5yo & 3yo) loved this book! They loved the “super cute” illustrations and the little surprise at the end. It also helped reinforce what they learned in other books about how pumpkins grow. I wish it had a few more details about planting and growing pumpkins as it seems a bit over-simplified. But my kids, who are the actual target audience, loved it. We recommend this book! ( )

A cute story about friendship and halloween and how two unlikely friends can both work together to create something great.

One late spring day, Cat wonders how pumpkins grow. Cat's friend, Mouse, decides to show her by helping her plant pumpkin seeds. As the days and months pass, the seeds grow into plants. With time and attention, flowers appear followed by little pumpkins. By the time Halloween rolls around, Mouse has a wonderful surprise for Cat.

The Bottom Line: This gentle story is perfect for any time of the year. It's a charming tale of friendship and gardening. Mortimer's beautiful illustrations are soft and colorful. This picture book will appeal to little ones and their parents. Teachers for grades K - 2 will find the "Instructions for Growing Pumpkins" at the back of the book useful as well.

This review also appears at the Mini Book Bytes Book Review Blog. ( )

Anthropomorphic animal tales can be a little tricky to pull off, I find, and Anne Mortimer's Pumpkin Cat doesn't quite get the job done, despite its beautiful artwork. Ostensibly a story about a cat and mouse who cultivate a pumpkin together, it offers a very basic, step-by-step guide to the process, as narrated by Mouse, who instructs Cat in: adding soil to the flower pot, planting and watering the seeds, relocating the plants outside and waiting as they grow, constructing a scarecrow, when the pumpkins first begin to appear, and harvesting the pumpkins when they're ripe. In one final step, Mouse creates a Halloween surprise for Cat...

If this list of activities doesn't sound particularly scintillating, that's because it isn't, making the narrative feel a little hum-drum. Mouse and Cat, moreover, don't feel very convincing, and simply aren't human enough to be engaging in the activities depicted - anthropomorphism tends to work, in my experience, when the animals in question are simply humans in another skin, or when the entire landscape of the story has been fantastically altered (ala Redwall, and other similar tales) - which continually jolted me out of the story. Still, the artwork is very appealing, especially for a cat lover, and I particularly liked the final spread.

Not really a success as a storybook, or even as a holiday celebration, Pumpkin Cat is one I'd recommend primarily to those who are fans of Anne Mortimer's feline artwork. ( )

This cat and mouse have obviously never watched Tom & Jerry. ( )