Review: “If You Give a Cat a Cupcake” by Laura Numeroff et al.

Thumbs down for If You Give a Cat a Cupcake by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond. Children’s.

Yes, I am actually giving a kid’s picture book a bad review. Hear me out. In the earlier entries in this series (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie etc), the activity on each page leads logically from the one before. That is, I think, rather the point, and that’s what makes them such fun. But not so in If You Give a Cat a Cupcake. There is no logical connection between events, and thus the cleverness of the eventual loop is lost. And when the cleverness goes, all you have left is cute pictures…and that’s not enough for me.