Where Is Little Reynard?

Joyce Carol Oates

Like Come Meet Muffin, another JCO-penned, Mark Graham-illustrated, Ecco-released picture book. Like Come Meet Muffin, about the Smith family and their daughter Lily (I have not been able to ascertain whether the Oates family has a daughter/granddaughter of that name from a quick web search). Like Come Meet Muffin, about a cat who hops out the window (though for a different reason this time) and gets lost.

Now, we all know that Joyce Carol Oates is, in fact, a human-shaped robot who does nothing but write (or keeps one chained in her basement, because someone has to be writing a thousand pages a day while she's teaching classes), because there's no human being on the planet who can turn out that much consistently good work at that rate of speed, let alone doing it for coming up on half a century now. But one wonders if the CD player in the robot's head skipped, because Where Is Little Reynard? is almost identical to Come Meet Muffin. Granted, five years passed between their release dates, but still. It's very un-JCO, otherwise Beasts would be functionally identical to Foxfire, which would be functionally identical to Because it Is Bitter..., which would be (you get the picture), and such is emphatically not the case. One is left, well, rather confused.

The saving grace is, of course, Mark Graham's lovely illustrations, which are themselves well worth the price of admission.

This one will probably stay a library loaner, unlike Come Meet Muffin, which I'll definitely be buying. But it's definitely one the kids will see at some point.