The Cinder-Eyed Cats

November 19, 2001
"Rohmann's bright-eyed cats and cryptic story are as mesmerizing as a vivid dream that seems at once perfectly clear and vaguely puzzling," said PW. Ages 5-8.

November 1, 1997
PreS-Gr 2-Five tigers with staring eyes fill the book jacket, front and back, suggesting a larger-than-life story. It's a nighttime fantasy featuring a boy who climbs aboard a boat hanging in the air above a pier and sails off to faraway lands. After a wordless sequence of several pages, the text begins in blank verse and moves into rhymed couplets to recount in spare lines the child's encounter with the cinder-eyed cats and a host of fish and sea creatures that "rise up from the deep" and join a frenzied night of dancing in the air above the sand. Double-page paintings of the tropical island terrain deepen as the sunny afternoon sky and sea move through twilight and into the dark of night. The scheme of sailing off into the night and a dreamlike encounter with wild animals are certainly nothing new, but the energy and surrealism provide a well-paced adventure with intriguing moments. The boy builds a large sand fish on the beach; as he dozes against its side, its eye begins to open. The celebration of night is a cheerful melee containing visual images-a circle of dancing tigers and the tigers mounted on one another's backs-familiar from well-known stories. As the morning sun calls the fish back to the sea, it's all a bit of a well-woven pastiche, sometimes Disneyish in the drawing but often bold and rich. A bedtime piece with flair.-Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

Starred review from November 15, 1997
Ages 5^-9. The story starts wordlessly with a double-page picture of a small boy climbing into a boat that hovers in midair. As the pages turn, the boy and the boat fly away to a lush tropical island where the text begins, "In faraway lands . . ." On the island, the boy sculpts a giant fish of sand and then falls asleep, awakening to find that he has been joined by five tigerlike cats, "their coal-fire eyes ablaze." Not to worry, they're friendly, and, as night falls, they frolic with the boy and the fish, which has magically come to life. Soon they are joined by real fish and a whole farrago of creatures from the deep, whirling and capering together in the sky beneath the moon. Until the sun rises "and suddenly they're gone." Rohmann's double-page paintings are wonderful in the same sense that the rhyming, surreal text is: they inspire wonder and, in several cases, awe, most notably a portrait of the cats and an image of whales floating, cloudlike, across the early morning sky. Although the art commands the most attention, the text is also full of memorable imagery. An enigmatically beautiful book that readers will turn to again and again. ((Reviewed November 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)