Kindergarten and up
I cannot foresee The Cat in the Hat ever going out of favor with children – they will always be bored by having nothing to do and will always be fascinated by the idea of Thing 1 and Thing 2. Children like to make messes, and the Cat plays on the almost innate tendency to touch that which is forbidden and to do whatever mischief is possible without getting caught.
No contemporary book quite reaches the balance that Dr. Seuss achieved in The Cat in the Hat between “right” (doing as the fish says) and “wrong” (doing as the Cat says), nor quite has the fun wordplay of a classic Seuss book. Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are celebrates the little beast inside children while it stresses the caring of their adults. Van Allsburg’s Jumanji and Zathura allow children a romp through some terribly destructive situations in the name of beating a game to get back to their homes in the normal world. Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants shows how two delinquent children can save the world and their necks by hypnotizing their principal into thinking he is a diaper-wearing superhero. But no author allows his characters to cause quite the havoc, or to clean up with such finesse, as Seuss did with his Cat.
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