CAT TRICKS

Fans of Baker's Hide and Snake (1991) will be happy to encounter this new book of catchy verse and tricky pictures in an intense purple, green, blue, and gold palette, used to depict cats, shoes, hats, clocks, patterned fabrics, and extravagant textures of all kinds. In this tall, narrow book, every other page is half- width; turning it transforms the picture into a completely different scene, showing a dapper black-and-white cat doing something quite improbable. The fun is in seeing how Baker transforms lines or shapes in one picture into something totally different in the next: a spiderweb to a ship's rigging, a sweeping green feather to a curling ocean wave, a loosely tangled plate of spaghetti to skate tracings on a frozen pond, a pair of green curtains to a plunging waterfall. Often an object in the first picture will prefigure something in the second, or the second will contain an echo of the first. In all, an illustrator's tour de force, and a great stimulus to a child's visual imagination. (Picture book. 5-8)