No Room to Swing a Cat

by Ralph Steadman

Book Overview

An illustrated book for young children which tells the story of Tom, whose room is so cluttered with toys that there is no room to swing a cat, or a moose, or even a dinosaur - until his mother comes... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0099680602
• ISBN13: 9780099680604
• Release Date: November 1992
• Publisher: Random House (UK)
• Length: 32 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

no room, plenty of whimsy...

Ralph Steadman. You may not know the name, but believe me, you'd recognize the art style at a glance. His furious, spastic pen-and-ink drawings laced with blown inks and blots of thick black-- as if someone snuck up behind him and yelled BOO! and his pen nib got frightened and let loose-- have been featured in perhaps every magazine and graced the covers of more than just his own books (the old cover for "Fear and Loathing" by Hunter S. Thompson comes to mind...). What's fascinating is the amount of books he has written himself.With such a jumbled style of illustration, you might find it odd that he's written a childrens' book. Published in Australia in 1989 and currently out of print in the States, it exists in "No Room to Swing a Cat."Our tale opens when our hero, Tom, announces that his room is too small (hardly surprising considering it's stuffed to the gills with blocks, cars, checkerboards, stuffed animals-- including a moose and dinosaur-- and Tom himself). His mother asks what he means, and Tom says that it's not even big enough to swing a cat in. NOTE: Tom doesn't WANT to swing a cat in it, he's merely pointing out that you CANNOT swing a cat in it-- a distinction that should probably be made to children who get this book read to them.Thereafter ensues some Steadmanian fun-- mainly two page spreads of Tom swinging various animals to his mother's enquiry of how big his room SHOULD be. "Big enough to swing a pig?" his mother asks, and there on the page is a teeny Tom swinging a large, stunned looking pig by the tail. Tom goes through a number of different animals, each getting larger and more ridiculous looking as they're being swung, until it's revealed that he want's his room big enough for HIM to swing in. At which point he and his mother go outside to Tom's swingset.If you've seen Steadman's artwork, you'll know it's quite chaotic and sometimes almost sinister-looking. Big blobs of ink are splattered pell-mell across the canvas; if the ink were red, you might think he had been brained right there at his easel. Tom himself is depicted with a big frown-- a simple upside-down semicircle line across his face that gives him a somewhat haunted look. For the last decade or so, the trend in children's books have been towards self-esteem and conflict resolution and away from chaotic illustrations of cockeyed kids whizzing stunned dogs around over their heads. The British phrase use as the title and genesis of the book may be enough for many people to pass up the chance to search for this one, but I personally don't see much harm in it. Firstly, most of the animals Tom flails about are already taking up space in his room at the very beginning of the book, and it seems reasonable to me that any room that you can't successfully swing a stuffed moose in IS too small.Secondly, for older children it can help to explain the complex world of adult phrases and simile ("guerrilla warfare" was the one