Cat and Fish

Joan Grant (author)

Neil Curtis (illustrations)

Lothian Books, Australia: 2003

ISBN: 0734404816

Genres: picture book

Issues: differences, friendship

CBCA for Picture Book of the Year, 2004.

This delightful, whimsical, slightly surreal story will charm readers of all ages. The superficial narrative concerns a fish and cat who meet in a park and, despite being from different worlds, take a liking to each other.

Together they try new things, explore new places and find that the adventure of life is much richer when shared. The clever arrangement of some lines of text into curved lines reinforces the subtext of looking at things from a different perspective, encourages readers to move beyond their preconceptions and think outside the square.

There is a very powerful relationship between the text and illustrations. Neil Curtis' pen and ink drawings are incredibly detailed and are layered with references to the woodcuts of artists such as Escher. Better picture books generally avoid the use of borders to illustrations, as this tends to constrain the reader's imagination to the page. In Cat and Fish, white borders constrain the remarkable black and white pictures, yet the whimsical, dream-like content immediately challenges any idea of constraint. The images are so powerful that, rather than being limited by their borders, they draw the reader into the slightly wilder, unconstrained world of the cat and the fish.

Highly recommended - a book to come back to again and again.