Author-illustrator Maria Coco has published books before in Spain, but her picture books Dogs Love Books, Too (2024) and Cats Love Books, Too (2025) are her first books published in the United States.
That earlier experience makes sense, because Cats Love Books, Too has a very unified voice and vision: it feels like the creator knows what’s she is doing, and has been at it for a while.
The illustration and design take the lead here. The first page, for example, is huge splashes of color showing a child (a girl, I think) sitting on a cushion with an over-sized book on her lap and a loving cat draped on the top of her head. No words, just a happy splash. Page 2 has just two brief lines: “Cats love books! / But why?” This question sets up the rest of the book, which tries to answer it, and this rough pattern of brief text on one page and images on the other largely continues throughout the book. There’s a bit of blurring at times: sometimes the image-only page has a poster or label, and, more rarely, each page in the two-page spread has a line of text.
The story is minimal. In fact, rather than a fully developed story, Cats Love Books, Too uses a question and answer structure: one question (why do cats love book), and multiple answers to express the writer’s love of books and cats, and to illuminate that love with these color explosions. This is almost a love letter to cats and books, and to cats loving books and stories.
If you’ve got a kid who likes one or the other (cats or books), they’ll like this.
