Cool Cat, Hot Dog

This is a weird book. It kind of shows opposites and comparisons. It kind of rhymes in parts, but not everywhere. Only sometimes, when it feels like it. It's just a cat and a dog trying to one-up each other, more or less. Or saying how they're different. It's difficult to tell what the point of their conversation is.

The art is interesting. I wouldn't say it's my favorite style. It's a collage, where the art is partly drawn. It seems almost intentionally bad. I guess idiosyncratic is the word you're supposed to use in this instance. There are photos of cardboard and paper that have been cut into shapes and stuck together with paper fasteners, so they could be positions, but it's not the same object on each page. The artist clearly made a different dog and cat for every page. It's the same character, but there's no way you could position the object in those different positions. There's also postage stamps and envelopes and wallpaper-looking parts to the collage. There's a lot of texture to the book. If it were actually the objects and not photos of them, it would be fun to play with and touch, but as it is, the photos are just flat and not interactive.

It's just a back and forth between a cat and a dog with human-like thoughts. Cats and dogs clearly do not actually have these thoughts. Things like, "I play the fiddle./I howl at the moon." "I stalk mice./I chase my tail." That kind of thing. The cat says something, and the dog replies. At the end, they declare that they love each other. I guess the message is that even very different creatures/metaphorically people can still get along, even if you don't like everything about someone, you can still love them? Maybe? It's hard to tell.