Bathe the Cat

Overview

"Bathe the Cat" is a picture book built on a single comic premise: a family sets out to tackle a list of Saturday chores, and their cat, dead set against being bathed, keeps shuffling the words on that list. Sweep the dishes. Vacuum the lawn. Rock the rug. Each new mix-up sends the household further into good-natured disarray, with the rhyming text driving the momentum and letting young readers guess what absurd task is coming next.

The family at the center of the story includes two fathers, Dad and Papa, along with a houseful of children, presented without commentary or explanation as simply how this family is put together. The chaos resolves when Dad finally wrangles the list back into order, though the cat's own fate at bath time remains the story's closing joke.

Alice B. McGinty's bouncing verse and David Roberts's brightly colored illustrations are tuned for repeated read-alouds, with the predictable rhyme scheme designed to let emerging readers anticipate and eventually join in on the lines themselves.

A Family Story Told Through Slapstick

What distinguishes "Bathe the Cat" from other read-aloud farces is how incidentally it treats its family structure. The household's size and warmth are established through the chore chaos itself, not through any explanatory aside about who Dad and Papa are to each other or to the kids. Roberts, illustrator of the widely read Questioneers series, brings the same expressive, kinetic linework here, rendering a home where mismatched chores and a conniving cat matter far more to the plot than any statement about family composition.

That incidental quality is itself the book's quiet significance. Rather than centering its two-dad household as the point of the story, the book folds it into the background of a plot about a cat's bathtime avoidance, offering young readers a depiction of an LGBTQ+-led family inside the same kind of silly, rhythmic romp that fills countless other picture-book shelves.

Why Bathe the Cat Has Been Challenged

Reviewers and read-aloud audiences have generally responded to "Bathe the Cat" as a lighthearted, well-crafted entry in the chaotic-chore-day genre of picture books, prized for its rhyme and its chaos rather than for making any kind of argument. The objections brought against it in schools and libraries have had little to do with that comic surface, and everything to do with its family structure: the book has drawn 2 state and 2 district challenges on record in this catalog.

The substance of these objections centers on the presence of Dad and Papa as the family's two parents. Challengers have characterized this matter-of-fact depiction of a same-sex-parented household as material unsuited to young children, typically folding the book into broader efforts to limit LGBTQ+ representation in picture books and early-elementary collections rather than raising concerns about language, violence, or other content categories more commonly cited in challenges to books for older readers.