Cinder-Eyed Cat ANNOTATION
A boy makes a magical trip to a tropical island where he and five tiger-like cats watch as various sea creatures emerge from the ocean to dance by the light of their campfire.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In his first book since Time Flies, his Caldecott Honor debut, Eric Rohmann transports a young boy in a magical sailboat to a lush tropical island inhabited by six cats with eyes like blazing coals. Rohmann's magnificent oil paintings draw the eye seamlessly from page to page, adding layers of complexity to a deceptively simple storyline. His palette reaches effortlessly from the brilliance of a tropical day to the glow of a starlit night, while his scenes range from breathtaking ocean vistas to the meticulously detailed and expressive creatures. The Cinder-Eyed Cats is both a sumptuous feast for the eye and a virtuoso feat of picture storytelling.
Time Flies , a wordless picture book, is inspired by the theory that birds are the modern relatives of dinosaurs. This story conveys the tale of a bird trapped in a dinosaur exhibit at a natural history museum. Through Eric's use of color, readers can actually see the bird enter into a mouth of a dinosaur, and then escape unscathed.
SYNOPSIS
A boy in a magical sailboat finds himself on a tropical island, where he encounters six cats with blazing eyes.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The enchanted land and dream-like eyes of Rohmann's (Time Flies) cinder-eyed cats are likely to hypnotize readers as effectively as they have the boy in these pages. The title page begins the wordless start to a boy's adventure. He climbs a rope ladder into a Wynken-Blynken-and-Nod-style sailboat that flies through the sky and drops anchor near a sandy beach. From a foreground of jungle ferns entwined with mysterious, curling cats' tails, the reader sees the boy in the distance build an enormous sand fish and fall asleep. Then the lyrical, rhythmic text begins: "In faraway lands,/ When twilight falls on fair and wind-swept days,/ Cats like velvet shadows move,/ Their coal-fire eyes ablaze." The boy, the cats, the sand fish (now come to life) and assorted denizens of the sea "make their getaway" to the night sky to dance in the moonlight until "the waking light of dawn." Then "suddenly they're gone." The illustrations take on the quality of animated film as silver fish "flash like cats' eyes in the light," and the boy and his cats reach for the "sea-blue sky." Rohmann's (Time Flies) bright-eyed cats and cryptic story are as mesmerizing as a vivid dream that seems at once perfectly clear and vaguely puzzling. Even readers who prefer loose ends to be tied up neatly will respond to these enigmatic golden cats who sleep tumbled together as the boy sails home in his sky-flying boat "until... the moon comes round once more." Ages 4-8. (Oct.)
Children's Literature - Meredith Kiger
A different format adds to the magic and strangeness of a young boy's journey to a special place where twilight causes the appearance of cats with coal-fired eyes, and all the creatures of the sea to be released in a fantasmagorical dance of freedom. As daylight appears, they disappear, and the young boy sails back to reality. Bold illustrations add even more dimension to this unusual tale.
School Library Journal
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
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