BLACK CAT

Myers (Walter Dean Myers’s Harlem, 1997) makes use of an idea with promise—following the trail of a black cat on its urban beat—but the result is less a hip city tour than a tortured grab at cool. Photographs form the backgrounds on which paint is layered, heightening some effects, flattening others. Onto these tinkered photographs are grafted cut-outs of a cat in various feline poses: licking a raised leg, strutting along a rooftop, preparing to pounce. Aspects of the cityscape are well served by the artistic approach—night scenes, building facades, sidewalks. But the text can be contradictory and obscure (“hearing the quiet language of invisible trains”) or, perhaps unintentionally, terrifying (“watching children screaming in playground cages”). (Picture book. 5-9)