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The Taming of the Cat
From twice-Kate Greenaway WINNER comes an exquisite story within a story, featuring a mouse who is forced to tell stories to save his life, a cat who plans to eat said mouse as soon as the story is finished, and our protagonist's protagonist, a princess in trouble.
1001 Nights style story within a story - starring a lethal cat and a mouse with a storytelling knack.
Within the pages of The Taming of the Cat is the adventure of a Princess who does not wish to be married. Written as a modern fairy story, this is a story about tolerance, outsiders, and non traditional partnerships. This illustrated story is accompanied with plenty of cheese, catnip, and magic feasts. There are two stories the story of Brie the mouse; and the fairytale he tells - Scheherazade-like, to Gorgonzola the cat.
1001 Nights style story within a story - starring a lethal cat and a mouse with a storytelling knack.
Within the pages of The Taming of the Cat is the adventure of a Princess who does not wish to be married. Written as a modern fairy story, this is a story about tolerance, outsiders, and non traditional partnerships. This illustrated story is accompanied with plenty of cheese, catnip, and magic feasts. There are two stories the story of Brie the mouse; and the fairytale he tells - Scheherazade-like, to Gorgonzola the cat.
- GenresAnimals
240 pages, Hardcover
Published October 5, 2023
41 people want to read
About the author
Helen Cooper
62 books105 followersHelen Sonia Cooper is a British illustrator and an author of children's literature. She grew up in Cumbria, where she practiced literature and piano playing. She currently lives in Oxford.
Cooper has twice been awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. She won for The Baby Who Wouldn't Go To Bed in 1996, which she wrote and illustrated. In 1998 she won for Pumpkin Soup, which she also wrote and illustrated. They were consecutive projects for her.
Beside winning the two Greenaway Medals (no one has won three), Cooper made the shortlist for The Bear Under the Stairs (Doubleday, 1993) and Tatty Ratty (Doubleday, 2001).
As well as her solo picture books, Cooper writes picture book texts for other illustrators, and also illustrates her own middle grade fiction - most recently, The Taming of the Cat' published by Faber and Faber in the UK.
WorldCat reports that Pumpkin Soup is her work most widely held in participating libraries.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See here for more details
Cooper has twice been awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), recognising the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. She won for The Baby Who Wouldn't Go To Bed in 1996, which she wrote and illustrated. In 1998 she won for Pumpkin Soup, which she also wrote and illustrated. They were consecutive projects for her.
Beside winning the two Greenaway Medals (no one has won three), Cooper made the shortlist for The Bear Under the Stairs (Doubleday, 1993) and Tatty Ratty (Doubleday, 2001).
As well as her solo picture books, Cooper writes picture book texts for other illustrators, and also illustrates her own middle grade fiction - most recently, The Taming of the Cat' published by Faber and Faber in the UK.
WorldCat reports that Pumpkin Soup is her work most widely held in participating libraries.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See here for more details
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 13, 2024
An excellent book for the advanced younger reader, and pretty enjoyable for the advanced senior, as well.
Brie is a mouse who collects cheese labels from the cheesemonger’s where he and a small colony of fellow mice live. These labels he fastens to his wall, and from them he concocts stories, stories that he tells to his fellow nest dwellers, stories that they loathe. This has led to his being isolated to the coldest part of the nest.
One winter night he is so cold that he feels he has to resort to the most dangerous option he has – to seek a place to sleep behind the soft-cheese fridge in the shop where he knows it to be warm. But he also knows that this is the fridge on top of which Gorgonzola, the shop’s watch-cat sleeps. And he is caught! But he extricates himself from this life-or-death situation by finding that Gorgonzola is bored and likes stories. So he tells her one, punctuated by both her threats to eat him and by her interest in the magic cat, Silk, that Brie ensures is included in the story. And thus she is hooked.
Then ensues a long story involving Silk and Princess Mimolette, daughter of King Rabacal and Queen Kashta. Mimolette desperately wants to avoid being made to marry the dull Prince Ludwig from the neighbouring kingdom where King Scamorza is plotting to acquire King Rabacal’s lands. Ludwig has obediently agreed to fall in with his father’s wishes, but it turns out he is lovesick for a librarian, Olivet, who has mysteriously disappeared. A number of other royal persons have disappeared too, including Queen Kashta and Queen Isabirra, Scamorza’s wife, as well as several princes.
What is going on? Will Silk and Mimolette succeed in unravelling the magic that the wicked Scamorza is practising? Will Brie survive? Read on to find out more!
This is an entertaining piece. Cooper maintains a sense of a story being made up on the hoof by a desperate, but increasingly confident Brie, and explores how a good story can captivate a reader/listener by using Gorgonzola to interrupt Brie’s narrative with questions, exclamations of approval and remarks about how the events ring true in her – for Gorgonzola is a lady cat – her own experience of life. There also is a sense that Cooper is explaining to her reader how a story can be put together, including observations to the effect of 'Do you remember when...?' to show little details are not necessarily random or irrelevant.
Thanks, Cooper tells us, to the Covid lockdown, she was able to design and include a great many more black and white illustrations than she and her publisher had intended. I was pleased, not only because they are delightful as they enhance the story, but also because, for younger readers, they make the prospect of a page of solid text less daunting. Cooper is specially good at drawing cats, and Gorgonzola is depicted as really very fearsome with a piratical ring in her right ear. Furthermore, characters and places bear the names of a wide range of cheeses, including Lymeswold and Crottin which are accorded to two scoundrel mice who bully Brie. In context, they sounded appropriately villainous to me – or perhaps they are simply cheeses that Cooper does not like?
Recommended.
Brie is a mouse who collects cheese labels from the cheesemonger’s where he and a small colony of fellow mice live. These labels he fastens to his wall, and from them he concocts stories, stories that he tells to his fellow nest dwellers, stories that they loathe. This has led to his being isolated to the coldest part of the nest.
One winter night he is so cold that he feels he has to resort to the most dangerous option he has – to seek a place to sleep behind the soft-cheese fridge in the shop where he knows it to be warm. But he also knows that this is the fridge on top of which Gorgonzola, the shop’s watch-cat sleeps. And he is caught! But he extricates himself from this life-or-death situation by finding that Gorgonzola is bored and likes stories. So he tells her one, punctuated by both her threats to eat him and by her interest in the magic cat, Silk, that Brie ensures is included in the story. And thus she is hooked.
Then ensues a long story involving Silk and Princess Mimolette, daughter of King Rabacal and Queen Kashta. Mimolette desperately wants to avoid being made to marry the dull Prince Ludwig from the neighbouring kingdom where King Scamorza is plotting to acquire King Rabacal’s lands. Ludwig has obediently agreed to fall in with his father’s wishes, but it turns out he is lovesick for a librarian, Olivet, who has mysteriously disappeared. A number of other royal persons have disappeared too, including Queen Kashta and Queen Isabirra, Scamorza’s wife, as well as several princes.
What is going on? Will Silk and Mimolette succeed in unravelling the magic that the wicked Scamorza is practising? Will Brie survive? Read on to find out more!
This is an entertaining piece. Cooper maintains a sense of a story being made up on the hoof by a desperate, but increasingly confident Brie, and explores how a good story can captivate a reader/listener by using Gorgonzola to interrupt Brie’s narrative with questions, exclamations of approval and remarks about how the events ring true in her – for Gorgonzola is a lady cat – her own experience of life. There also is a sense that Cooper is explaining to her reader how a story can be put together, including observations to the effect of 'Do you remember when...?' to show little details are not necessarily random or irrelevant.
Thanks, Cooper tells us, to the Covid lockdown, she was able to design and include a great many more black and white illustrations than she and her publisher had intended. I was pleased, not only because they are delightful as they enhance the story, but also because, for younger readers, they make the prospect of a page of solid text less daunting. Cooper is specially good at drawing cats, and Gorgonzola is depicted as really very fearsome with a piratical ring in her right ear. Furthermore, characters and places bear the names of a wide range of cheeses, including Lymeswold and Crottin which are accorded to two scoundrel mice who bully Brie. In context, they sounded appropriately villainous to me – or perhaps they are simply cheeses that Cooper does not like?
Recommended.
January 10, 2024
A nice, if well-worn conceit - a mouse saves himself from being slaughtered and eaten by a cat by telling her a story in installments until he has gained her friendship. Unfortunately however, I found both the story itself and its telling somewhat uninspired. There are some nice touches throughout this book, and the illustrations are lovely, but on the whole it did not meet my expectations and I was quite bored by it.
September 10, 2023
To avoid being eaten, a mouse living in a cheese shop tells its cat custodian a hastily-invented saga of magic-driven quest. But if you feel the fantasy shows too many signs of being hastily written, and fitting ill with the framing device, you won't be alone.
For my full three-and-some-whiskers review, please click to:- http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/T...
For my full three-and-some-whiskers review, please click to:- http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/T...
February 5, 2024
Love love love
July 12, 2024
This young middle-grade book is about a misfit mouse who distracts a murderous cat by telling him stories
Brie the mouse, unlike the rest of his group, doesn't like cheese, but breadcrumbs. Whilst the others chew up the cheese labels, Brie admires the pictures. They inspire him. Just by looking at them, he conjures up stories. Unfortunately there is no one to share them with. One day he is caught by the resident cat, Gorgonzola. In a desperate move to distract the cat, Brie tells Gorgonzola a story.
I enjoyed this creative twist to the classical 1001 Arabian nights. Two creative stories in one, as we read about Brie's perilous situation, as well as the story he tells. What surprised me the most was learning in the author's notes that the character names were in fact a plethora of cheese name.
Opening line: There was once a fabulous cheese shop that was guarded by a fearsome cat.
Brie the mouse, unlike the rest of his group, doesn't like cheese, but breadcrumbs. Whilst the others chew up the cheese labels, Brie admires the pictures. They inspire him. Just by looking at them, he conjures up stories. Unfortunately there is no one to share them with. One day he is caught by the resident cat, Gorgonzola. In a desperate move to distract the cat, Brie tells Gorgonzola a story.
I enjoyed this creative twist to the classical 1001 Arabian nights. Two creative stories in one, as we read about Brie's perilous situation, as well as the story he tells. What surprised me the most was learning in the author's notes that the character names were in fact a plethora of cheese name.
Opening line: There was once a fabulous cheese shop that was guarded by a fearsome cat.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews