Nonfiction Picture Book Wednesday: Scarlett the Cat to the Rescue #nfpb2015

My favorite reading challenge is Kid Lit Frenzy’s Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge. Visit Alyson’s blog to discover more wonderful nonfiction titles.

My regular readers know I feel about cats.

I lurve them. In big piles or scatterings. Cats here and there, everywhere. And with six of them, it often does feel like cats here, there, everywhere, at my house. As I’m writing this post, there are four cats in the room with me, draped over various pieces of furniture trying to stay cool.

I lurve books about cats too. The only thing that’s better than a book about cats is a book about hero cats, and Nancy Loewen’s Scarlett the Cat to the Rescue: Fire Hero is a great book about an inspiring hero cat.

The story begins when an abandoned garage catches on fire, and the stray mama cat who has been living inside with her kittens must escape. This is no ordinary mama cat, however. This mama cat returns to the burning building again and again and again to rescue her kittens, getting badly burned in the process. A firefighter on the scene realizes what has happened when he finds several kittens scattered on the ground outside the building. He looks for the mama cat and finds her across the street in a vacant lot, nearly dead.

Carefully, David placed the cat in the box with her kittens. Though the mama cat couldn’t see, she touched each one of her babies with her nose. It was as if she was counting them to make sure they were all there.

The cat and her kittens are taken to the vet where they receive care for their injuries, names, and eventually homes. Scarlett lives out her days as a pampered indoor kitty.

The Afterword was probably my favorite part of the story because there’s a big photo of Scarlett. It was one thing to imagine her injuries and quite another to see how badly damaged her face, eyes, and ears were from returning repeatedly to the burning building to rescue her kittens.

There is some back matter, including a Glossary, suggestions for more reading, and an Internet site to visit. There is also a very silly section called “Critical Thinking with the Common Core” which includes three questions that I think are supposed to be “critical thinking” questions. Two of the three stray very far outside the four corners of the text, and one even asks about FEELINGS, which we know are verboten in the Common Core.

Scarlett the Cat to the Rescue is part of a series of nonfiction picture books about heroic animals.