Purrfectly Purrfect: Life at the Acatemy - Softcover

Patricia Lauber is the author of more than sixty-five books for young readers. Many of them are in the field of science, and their range reflects the diversity of her own interests-bats, dolphins, dogs, volcanoes, earthquakes, the ice ages, the Everglades, the planets, earthworms. Two of her books, SEEDS: POP STICK GLIDE and JOURNEY TO THE PLANETS, were nonfiction nominees for The American Book Awards. She was the 1983 winner of The Washington Post/Children's Book Guild Award for her overall contribution to children's nonfiction literature.

As well as writing books, Ms. Lauber has been editor of Junior Scholastic, editor-in-chief of Science World, and chief editor, science and mathematics, of The New Book of Knowledge

A graduate of Wellesley College, she is married and lives in Connecticut. When not writing, she enjoys hiking, sailing, traveling, cooking, reading, and listening to music.

Betsy Lewin grew up in Clearfield,Pennsylvania. She always loved to draw and can’t remember ever wanting to be anything but an artist. Her mother (a kindergarten teacher) is responsible for her love of children’s books. She read to Betsy and her brother every night: Winnie the Pooh, The Adventures of Babar, Uncle Remus, and all the fairy-tale books. The illustrators Ernest Shepard and A. B. Frost were among her earliest heroes. Later on, when she started illustrating for children, Betsy realized how strongly she’d been influenced by the gentle watercolors of Beatrix Potter and the energetic line and humor of James Stevenson and Quentin Blake.

After graduating from Pratt Institute, where she studied illustration, Betsy took a job as an assistant art director at a greeting-card company in New York, which led to freelance work for several other card companies. Then she began to write and illustrate stories for children’s magazines. When an editor at Dodd, Mead & Company asked her to expand one of those stories into a picture book, Betsy says, “I jumped at the chance. I’ve been doing picture books ever since and loving every moment.”

Betsy’s art is usually humorous, drawn in pen with watercolor washes, as in Is It Far to Zanzibar? But she also paints in a naturalistic style, as in Walk a Green Path, in which she expresses her love for the natural world through paintings and poetry. Gorilla Walk is her first collaboration with her husband, Ted, and is about their trek to see the mountain gorillas in Uganda. They’ve just completed their second collaboration, Elephant Quest, set in the Okavango Delta of Botswana.

When not at work on their books, Ted and Betsy love to travel to exotic places around the world gathering material for new books. At home each of them has a studio in their brownstone house in Brooklyn. Besides the usual clutter of pencils and pens, paint tubes and brushes, drawing paper, and, of course, books, they surround themselves with mementos of their travels: peacock feathers from India, Herero dolls from Botswana, galimoto toys from Namibia and Brazil, brass pots from Egypt, postcards and snapshots.

Grade 3-6-This slight, witty, amusingly illustrated story is one giant pun about cats. "The Acatemy" is a finishing school where young cats learn to be "purrfect," studying a "purriculum" of courses such as "Cats in Nature," "Cats in Geography," and "Mewsic," while writing purrsonal essays and exploring other purrsuits. The story follows Bo, Tiffany, and Dudley as they enter the Acatemy for their month of studies. The head allows Dudley to stay the first day, but sends him home with a note explaining that he cannot return until he is eight months old. However, much to the head's chagrin, Dudley returns daily, following the other cats right up until Graducation Day where he wins an award for attaining a purrfect zero in all of his classes. Youngsters will enjoy the silliness of the story, seemingly an excuse for playful language. Lewin's charming black-and-white line drawings are delightfully humorous and lend whimsy to an already whimsical piece of writing. Stretching the metaphor to tedium and beyond, it would not be a catastrophe if this book was not added to library collections, but its purrfect goofiness might appeal to reluctant readers and feline fanciers.
Alice Casey Smith, Sayreville Public Schools, Parlin, NJ
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