Can You Catch Me? Tutu and the Vehicles, story time fun for the very young

The sublime simplicity of Can You Catch Me? Tutu and the Vehicles is disarming, immediate and resistance is futile. Tutu is a cute cat with disproportionally big eyes and is dressed like a ninja. The first page starts with a taunt of someone telling Tutu that they can’t catch them, as a black tail wisps away. Then we see Tutu jump on all manner of vehicles as they venture through a setting and onto or into a moving object in gentle pursuit of the black thing. Can You Catch Me? has the timeless graphics that today’s crawlers will find just as interesting as those ages will in 50 years.

The lines in the book are thick, with big, happy animals, cartoonish settings, and wondrous vehicles to accommodate young children who need a fast-moving book that lets their imaginations go places. Adults will notice that there are educational instances for those ages, and just as futile as your resistance was to the book, so it will be too in their attempts to not enjoy learning. It follows the Billy from The Family Circus line of engagement in that you want to see where our title character is going.

However, in Can You Catch Me?, the joy is not in running your fingers along the dotted line, it’s in seeing the vivid colors and smiling as our ninja, spy-in-training cat deftly moves about. They’ll laugh as Tutu flips over a bride and careens onto a train. They will marvel at how he grabbed the motorcycle with one hand and surfed from the boat on top of a wave into a moving car. If they haven’t found a replacement for Daniel Craig as James Bond, and intend on turning the series into a much simpler animated version aimed at pre-k kids, they need to look up Tutu. He even sports some black sunglasses in one of the scenes.

There’s a kinetic, fun, movement that’s on every page of the book. The text is very brief and allows for those young children to start learning a couple of sight words. The pages are glossy and slightly thicker than average which allows those crawlers to be able to turn the pages more easily. Its length is long enough to read once really slowly as a good-night book, but short enough to read it once and then leave the book for the kids to thumb through the pages.

 This is where the ‘fun’ element of books, especially for those crawlers through first grade comes into play. It has to have the ‘it’ factor. For books that are aimed at audiences who are younger than pre-k the ‘it’ factor is wacky fun that makes them smile. Can You Catch Me?  Tutu and the Vehicles has that characteristic with some to spare for others that need a little mojo. From the slightly embossed race car-with Tutu driving it on the book’s cover, to the punch line that some kids will see coming, it rips with energy and has the potential make kids learn to love to read. It also opens up an entirely new world to Tutu. They’ve discovered vehicles, but there are so many other things that a mischievous cat can find, places to live, bodies of water, jobs, buildings or anything that a cat accommodates a cat and its wanderings.

Can You Catch Me? Tutu and the Vehicles is by Piotr Karski and is available on Boxer Books, an imprint of Union Square & Co., a subsidiary of Sterling Publishing Co. Inc.

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