Jenny's Birthday Book

I bought this for my daughter's birthday. We are having a Jenny Linsky party with everything from a JL cake to invites to party favors. This book will be one of her presents, along with a knitted red scarf with six pom poms of course. It is a delightful story about Jenny's friends giving her a birthday party in the park. It is a tad steep for a 32 page book, but it does have adorable illustrations. Most of the other books are packed with more story, but this one has lots of full color illustrations (not all are color though) rather then black and white. Great for your cat loving kid. Don't miss the other books in the series either. Boys will enjoy the book "Pickles the Firecat" about a boy cat who wants to do "big things." Classic story, classic drawings, and to a boys delight, FIRETRUCKS.

I was delighted to find these books again. For years I have been searching for the books about the little black cat, Jenny. Recently, I was at Books of Wonder and was jokingly testing the salesperson's knowledge. She knew! I couldn't believe it. These books were a pleasure to me as a child and spurred my love of reading. I intend to buy all of them for my daughter.

I first read Jenny's Birthday Book as a shy kindergartener. I picked it out of the school library based on my love for cats, the wonderful colors on the cover and because my birthday happened to be coming up. There was no way to know the impact of that library visit. The following Septembers spent at Berkeley Street School, I would take out Jenny's Birthday Book as a special birthday ritual and read it slowly and mindfully, taken by the gentleness of the language and illustrations. The book was not only a comfort at the time, but shaped my sense of aesthetics and love for language. Even as an adult I am taken by the beauty of the scene where Jenny and her rambunctious friends "... danced the sailor's hornpipe in the moonlit park." Anyway, never forgetting this book, I had been on fruitless search for it for the past 15 years (I thought it was titled Jenny's Birthday Party and didn't know the author) and happened upon it in a friend's shop. With a little girl on the way, I can't explain how thankful I am that it has been republished and now own it with the plan to read it to my own daughter.

I loved all the Jenny Linskey books as a child and still find them charming as an adult. They are queit, gentle books and I remember how as a shy child it was comforting to have books about other shy creatures read to me. It also helped a lot that the cat and I shared a name, Jenny, and that I had a pet black cat.

Any shy child will receive a tremendous boost from the JennyLinsky books, particularly this book about her birthday. Jenny is agentle New York cat who, in this book, gets swept up by her more rambunctious friends for a moonlight feast and dance in Central Park, in honor of her birthday. There is a delightful Bohemian flavor to this crew of felines: one wears an American Indian headband and feather for no apparent reason. Male cats dance with male cats. And there's something slightly transgressive and empowering about the way they take over the park at night. The text and illustrations are simple, ideal for ages 3 to 8. Jenny is picked up for the birthday by her friend, Pickles the Firecat, in a firetruck. They pick up other cat friends, a bluefish wrapped like a gift, and gather in the park where they all dance the hornpipe. Then they go home, tired and happy, and sing to Jenny Linsky as she gets into bed. That's the whole plot. Yet this book has the slightly mysterious quality that raises a children's book above the mundane and makes it resonate with a child's inner world. It will stay with your child for life. This was a pivotal book in my childhood. My mother painted a mural of Jenny Linsky and her cat friends riding their firetruck on the wall of our basement. I cannot for the life of me understand why it (and the other Jenny Linsky books) is out of print.