If the experience of five-year-old Angelina Domino is a reliable guide, facing your fears is a lot like entering cold water. You can ease in gradually and hope for smooth acclimatization or you can plunge in and hope the shock will contain the cure. Ultimately, this book champions the latter solution, but not before insulating the story with gentle tones and constant reassurance.

Angelina’s fear of animals begins with the kitten she receives for her birthday, a feisty creature named Boris who claws and bites. Even after Boris is removed (he goes to an animal shelter whereupon, we are assured, he is readopted), Angelina’s anxiety persists. It is not until her playmate Josephine smuggles a large stray cat into Angelina’s bedroom that progress occurs. Angelina is forced to confront the purring, marmalade lump on her bed, and with the help of her mother, she befriends it. All ends well: the stray joins the family, and Angelina makes up with the ambiguously motivated Josephine.

This is the second picture-book collaboration between veteran Nova Scotia-based writer Budge Wilson and the prolific Ontario-based illustrator Eugenie Fernandes. The two seem to work well together, united, perhaps, by their mutual affection for cats (which also formed the subject of their first collaboration, The Long Wait). Fernandes has used soft colours to complement the gentle tone of the text and has given the characters, including the animals, vivid expressions to reflect the range of emotions in the story. The book is solidly written: its vocabulary is basic and its sentences are nicely varied, making it a good candidate for reading aloud to young children.