How To: How to Give Your Cat A Bath (In FIve Easy Steps) by Nicola Winstanley

STEP ONE: Fill the bath tub with warm water.

That's too much water!

Oops.

The water should come up to the cat's knees.

KNEES?

Cats have knees? (Who knew?)

The little girl with pom-pom ponytails has a lit-tle trouble following these five easy steps. Her cat, Mr. Flea, has no intention of getting wet. He's the mysterious disappearing cat in two flicks of a cat's whiskers.

Now where is he?

Where's that manual for How to Find Your Cat?

Our little pet care student decides to change Step One to having some cookies and milk to settle frazzled nerves! OOPS! She drops the tray!

The cat kindly laps up the spilled milk. But by now the water in the tub is too cold. Meeowwrrr! Mr. Fleas makes that more than evident! More hot water is needed.

STEP FOUR: Hold the cat in one arm and turn on the tap with other. OOOOOPS!

Chase cat downstairs!

Return to bathroom and mop floor. Our girl needs another cookie to quiet her nerves.

Meanwhile the unflappable Mr. Flea re-writes the procedure:

STEP ONE: Wait quietly while your cat licks himself clean.

Nicola Winstanley's little HOW-TO manual, How to Give Your Cat a Bath: in Five Easy Steps (Tundra Books, 2019), offers the wisdom of letting the cat take care of cleanliness. Face it, cat owners: You may indeed succeed in sousing your cat in soapy water, scrubbing him clean, and blowing him dry so that he is one perfectly sterile cat, but be forewarned: he's going to spend the rest of the day giving himself a cat spit bath all over, right down to the tip of his tail!

Winstanley's hilarious story of pet care will win chuckles from primary readers who will find the text easy going, with how-to steps designed in boldface font and the rest in a less austere font. John Martz' spare black-line drawings and bright colors make for fun page turning.

"The inevitable ending will delight both children and adults and this title will be requested over and over.” says Booklist's starred review.

For kids ready for beginning chapter books, share this one with Nick Bruel's Bad Kitty Gets a Bath (read review here).

Handy How-To: Caring for Your Lion by Tammi Sauer

Congratulations on your new lion!
I know you ordered a kitten, but we ran out of those.

Caring for your lion is easy. Just follow your handy guide.

Step 1: Take a deep breath and carefully open the crate.

Clearly the kid is already in trouble. You expect a sweet little kitty cat and you get a full-sized maned lion? This is going to require more than deep breathing! And then there’s that next direction, a seeming non-sequitur.

Step 2: Locate the enclosed feather.

Keep it handy in case of emergency.

Huh?

This is getting ridiculous! The kid is supposed to fend off a lion with a feather?

He quickly skims the manual for more helpful hints. The next one makes him quickly cover the bunny on his tee-shirt:

Try NOT to look like a zebra or a gazelle. Or a bunny.

Thanks for the warning, Gilligan!

The following step, related to the feeding his new pet, has the kid ordering ten Extreme Pizzas, which, with extra toppings--a bit of zebra burger and antelope antipasto--seem to give the boy a respite from being prey while he works on the rest of the steps to lion management. These become pressing when the Lion, still a little peckish after his pizza snacks, disobeys the next injunction and swallows the UPS guy. The kid is forced to tickle his tonsils with the aforementioned feather until he barfs up the poor delivery man. So that's what the feather is for. O-kay.

With that out of the way, our kid proceeds to unpack the Potty Training Kit (Some Assembly Required) and fill it with 100 pounds of Scoop-De-Doop Cat Litter, which, while strenuous, is easier than getting the lion to use it.

And our poor newbie pet owner is still not even halfway through the steps in the lion care manual, in the comedic Tammi Sauer's spoofy, tongue-in-cheek, and sensationally silly new book, Caring for Your Lion (Sterling Books, 2017). Sauer's co-owner, artist Troy Cummings, uses his considerable digital cartooning skills to document the process of domesticating a pet who is not exactly what it was cracked up to be. For more pet-care fun, share this one with Jodi Moore's When a Dragon Moves In or Jane Yolen's How Do Dinosaurs Choose Their Pets?