Shapes

by Airlie Anderson

Cat and her family return to our bookshelves in a new series introducing basic concepts. Babies will love the bold colours and enjoy listening to a reader share the simple text with them.

Genres: Animals, Picture Books

14 pages, Board Book

Published October 31, 2023

About the author

Airlie Anderson is the author and illustrator of Neither, Cat’s Colors, and Momo and Snap Are Not Friends. She grew up in California and spent a lot of time reading and drawing, as well as swimming and pretending to ride a horse. Her early influences were animation art, pop art, and comics.

​Airlie attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where she majored in illustration and focused on children’s books, a natural choice given her love for saturated color and expressive characters.

​She now lives in beautiful, underrated New Jersey with her family, and enjoys the close proximity to New York City (book country)! She is the recipient of the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, the Independent Publisher Book Award, and the Practical Preschool award.

Reviews

[Jer Bear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars for the gnawing potential, but about two stars for the story, and that's being generous. I have averaged the two scores out for this three-star rating.

[Fatima Seraj Alam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for learning and reinforcing the shapes through cute cats for little ones.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of the Curious Cats series, which has four titles so far, this board book introduces young readers to five shapes, including a square, a circle, a rectangle, a star, and a triangle. Four kittens who are all different colors from their mother cat, who is pure white frolic across the pages, either playing or hanging out near the shapes. Readers can see the whole family on the last two pages. As with the other titles in this series, the content offers an entertaining and relatable way to learn about an important concept.

[Kelly]

This book is decent. I like that it's colors, shapes, and prepositions. But the page that shows the giant shape is kind of unnecessary since the shape is already large on the previous page. Maybe we could have done more prepositions and more shapes?

[Melissa the Librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book hits all the right notes for me--it introduces colors, shapes, and prepositions with simple and adorable illustrations. An excellent board book!

[Andrés · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is elegant in composition and an extremely compact way to learn shapes as well as colors and prepositions.