Kitten Construction Company: Meet the house kittens by John Patrick Green

I saw mixed reviews of Green's first young graphic novel, Hippopotamister, but my book club kids loved it, saying it was really funny! So, although I'm again seeing mixed reviews and have some mixed feelings myself about his latest comic book, I'm not ready to dismiss it without some child testing.

A white man in a suit is examining blueprints for the mayor's new mansion. But even though the blueprints are great, he just can't hire the architect because, well, she's just too cute! In fact, she's a kitten! Marmalade is frustrated and angry that no one will take her seriously, so she ends up gathering a crew of adorable kitties who happen to be skilled plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. They're delighted to be hired as a construction crew, only to discover that they're being given pointless tasks. No matter how they try, everyone just sees them as cute kittens! So they decide to build their own, superior version of the mayor's mansion. On the big day, the city planner unveils the mansion to reveal a towering disaster! Will there be any way to save the day? And will the kittens ever be taken seriously?

Bright, cheerful colors fill the pages, showing the adorable, fluffy kittens as they don hard hats, drive vehicles, and work hard to prove themselves. The human-made mansion is laughably bad - balanced on columns, tilted all ways, and finally collapsing when it's unveiled. When the city planner tries to get his construction crew, a mixed race group that includes a black man and a white woman with curly, purple hair, to see how the kitten construction crew is doing things right he shows them pictures - cue for cute kitten videos on his phone of real kittens playing in and around construction equipment. The mayor is a dark-skinned woman in a dark pink pantsuit and the kittens' successful mansion is a towering building with lawns, a brick wall, and a large porch.

The message of not judging by appearances feels kind of weird - the humans are a mostly diverse group, but all the human construction crews are shown to be incompetent. The kittens never do really win respect - the mayor refuses to believe they built the mansion but the city planner promises to assign them new projects, since he's the only one not blinded by their cuteness. What I really want to know is... why are they building the mayor a mansion? What does the city planner have to do with this? It just feels... odd.

Verdict: This is certainly cute and funny, with a good message about not judging about appearances. Although it didn't quite click for me personally, I think it will be just as popular with the kids as Green's previous titles and look forward to discussing it in book club.

ISBN: 9781626728301; Published September 2018 by First Second; Borrowed from another library in my consortium