FIDDLE-I-FEE: A Traditional American Chant

The chant on which this otherwise wordless book is built is the one beginning ""Had me a cat, the cat pleased me,/ I fed my cat in yonders tree,/ Cat went fiddle-i-fee."" And what we have here, beginning on the title-page spread, is a little blue-jeaned girl climbing up into a full-scale, furnished tree house, somehow cooking a party dinner (we see her mixing dough, etc.; we don't see an oven), and then going to bed in a star-flecked gown and tiara. Overleaf--presumably in her dreams--the rhyme begins with the entrance of the aforementioned cat. The other animals arrive (""Had me a sheep, the sheep pleased me,"" etc.), make their characteristic sounds (""Sheep went baa-baa-baa""), and depart--leaving the little girl dozing off again at the table. It's necessary to be literal because that's exactly what this is--not an imaginative extension but a reduction to implausibility.