Tag Em Lynas

The Goat and the Stoat and the Boat

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The Goat and the Stoat and the Boat
Em Lynas and Matt Hunt
Nosy Crow

Sit back, sail along and enjoy the rhyming fun from the team who gave us The Cat and the Rat and the Hat; the text for this one is every bit as funny and lively and Matt Hunt’s highly energetic scenes of what turns out to be a fair bit of rocking and rolling, which inevitably leads to some pretty catastrophic consequences, are just superb.

It all begins with Stoat floating merrily along in his favourite boat when along comes Goat. Goat too wants to float in that same boat so on he leaps.

The problem is that although Stoat is well aware of the way to keep safe therein, Goat most certainly is not. All he wants is to have fun too. Pretty soon however, things start to turn nasty. Stoat seizes a pencil and lays claim to the boat, which develops into a pencil power dual.

That is when, in addition to the rocking and rolling, the boat starts wibbling and wobbling, tilting and tipping and it’s not long before there’s a big splash in the moat. You’ll quickly guess the cause of that. Now the thing is that Goat in that colourful coat is able to stay afloat; not so however, Stoat. Is it time for a truce?

Adult readers aloud will need to take care their tongues don’t get into a twist when they share this cleverly constructed tale. Young listeners will delight in the cumulative chaos that the animals cause; Matt Hunt’s expressive illustrations portray this with panache..

The Cat and the Rat and the Hat

jillrbennett Leave a comment

The Cat and the Rat and the Hat
Em Lynas and Matt Hunt
Nosy Crow

Comic capers of the daftest kind unfold in Em Lynas’s unashamedly ‘cat-ipalising’ assemblage of sound/symbol associations that she’s fashioned into a sequence of silly scenarios all about various items of attire and the lengths her animal characters will go to, to acquire them.

There’s the cat that plays, sleeps and dreams upon the mat; the rat with a big hat (dayglo pink to match its appendages) – at the start anyhow;

but a tustle ensues …

then there’s the bat sporting a fancy cravat (of the same pink colour albeit with tiny white dots) but also eager to take possession of said hat and willing to perform all manner of acrobatic actions to prevent others seizing the cravat.

Various snatch and grab actions follow but to find out who eventually ends up with which article of adornment, you’ll need to bag yourself a copy of this crazy book and read it yourself. ‘And that is that.’

With those neon bright colours, Matt Hunt makes the entire thing into a laugh out loud reading experience for beginning readers as well as for adults sharing the book with little ones.