HEPCAT

Thin in more ways than one, this debut from a newspaper cartoonist features a long, skinny feline beatnik in beret and shades, frantically searching for his suddenly lost groove. Hepcat’s quest starts out promisingly enough, as he encounters four mop-topped “beetles,” a rumpled Elvis warming his hands at a trashcan fire, and a stride piano-playing frog with a Little Richard pompadour, all of whom offer familiar advice or general comments (“Take a sad song and make it better”)—but then Bramhall’s invention peters out into a succession of generic street and storm noises that Hepcat brushes past at first, before eventually realizing how fundamentally musical they are. Even younger viewers will probably recognize the caricatured Pop icons, but that parade stops almost before it starts, and next to the likes of Mordicai Gerstein’s What Charlie Heard (2002), the theme of music’s ubiquity in the world all around gets a conventional rendition. (Picture book. 6-8)