Cool Daddy Rat

The scatting rhythms are great. The pictures are *ugly* imo. The storyline doesn't quite make sense as too much is accomplished in one day, when everyone knows jazz belongs to the night.

I'm working on a list of "Books you can dance to," and this sounded promising. The art's cute, and scat is is always fun, but the scansion is just enough off that it's hard to read aloud, and the beat doesn't always hit just right.

Cool Daddy Rat follows Daddy Rat and his stowaway son Ace through a night of bass-playing, scat-filled jazz gigs. Preschool kids will love all the silly-sounding scat words although most won't recognize the New York locations that form the background scenery and add extra flavor to the story. The illustrations are done in a cartoon style and colored with what look like watercolors to me (Sadly I do not have the book in front of me to check for an illustration note). I'd be interested to see how a group of older kids would react to this - maybe as an intro to a lesson on jazz? They might enjoy it for more than just the silly sounds.

Used for music themed storytimes 3/3/09 and 3/5/09.

This is a book about a baby rat who hides in his dad's muic case and goes with him all over town t listen to him play jazz.

Brian and Stephen at Book Dads find some of the coolest books I've never heard about. The mere mention of New York and jazz in their review of Cool Daddy Rat got me interested in this one.