Two years ago poet Sheila Dalton and illustrator Kim LaFave created Doggerel, a jaunty rhyming picture book about all sorts of dogs, and this spring they’ve followed it with a similarly jaunty book about cats. Catalogue is a pleasure to read aloud, with its bouncy rhythm and collections of adjectives for cats: tabby, crabby, crazy; black, slack, and lazy. Dalton does not condescend to her young readers’ vocabulary, giving them “brash succotash cats,” “hard avant-garde cats,” and even “cats that read poems by Omar Khayyam.” The rhyme and rhythm help the reader to deal with the challenging words and make them an important part of the sheer fun of the verse. Like Doggerel, Catalogue ends on a cozy note, with one kitten and one little girl. In his pictures, LaFave suggests that the whole catalogue of cats is dreamed by the little girl, curled up snugly with her kitten and surrounded by objects in her bedroom – a copy of Alice in Wonderland, a picture of a boat – which give rise to some of the dream cats. Cute, goofy, or scary, all of the antic cats are eventually banished and the girl cuddles her own kitten.

LaFave is an inventive and expressive illustrator and his cats circle and pounce through the pages of Catalogue in a variety of funny colours, shapes, and outlandish garments. His pictures inventively frame the text in many different ways. Some of his cats creep or lounge in naturalistic postures, while others indulge in humorously uncatlike actions, such as forming a line of Russian dancers squatting and kicking. The rather frenetic tone of the pictures is a good match with the bouncy rhythms of the verse, although it seems perhaps better suited to the bumptious frolicking of dogs than the cooler, self-contained behaviour of most cats. While it may not be a classic of cat literature, Catalogue is a lively, playful, and engaging picture book.