Pete the Cat Books: Which Ones Are Actually Good

Hey, Story Seekers!

There are around eighty-seven Pete the Cat books.

I'll wait while you read that again.

Eighty-seven. Picture books, sticker books, lift-the-flap books, board books, leveled readers at three different levels, holiday books for holidays you'd forgotten existed.

So when a parent stands in the library holding four blue cats and asks which one is the good one, that is a completely reasonable question.

And unlike most series, this one has an actual answer.

Readit is here as well, mostly because he wants to know how one cat gets this much work.

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Pete the Cat

The books were not all made by the same person.

That sounds like trivia. It isn't. It's the single most useful fact for anybody choosing one.

Here's the history, and it's worth getting right.

James Dean created Pete. He painted the character back in 1999 and self-published The Misadventures of Pete the Cat in 2006. Pete is his. The look, the blue, the enormous feet, all of it.

Eric Litwin wrote the words and the songs for the first four books, starting with I Love My White Shoes in 2008. Litwin is a musician. Those books are built as songs with pages attached, which is why they beg to be sung instead of read.

The pair self-published that first one and sold about 7,000 copies in ten months. Then a video of two little girls reading it went around online, HarperCollins picked it up, and the thing went to number 8 on the New York Times picture book list.

The partnership ended in 2012. Creative differences, and it took lawyers to sort out. Since then James Dean and his wife Kimberly Dean have written and illustrated the series, and they've made more than sixty of them.

Nobody is the villain in that story. But it does mean the shelf in front of you contains two genuinely different kinds of book with the same cat on the cover.

Which Ones, and Why

Three books. All Litwin, all songs.

• Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes (2010). New shoes, four disasters, one cat who refuses to be upset. We reviewed it here.
• Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons (2012). Buttons pop off one at a time. Counting down, singing all the way. The highest-rated book in the entire franchise.
• Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes (2011). Pete goes to school and stays cool about all of it. The first-day-of-school book that doesn't panic.

Those three average 4.36 on Goodreads.

The eighteen most-popular Dean books average 4.07, and only one of them, Pete the Cat and the Missing Cupcakes, cracks 4.35.

And look at the rating counts, because they say more than the scores do. I Love My White Shoes has been rated nearly 61,000 times. The next most-rated book in the franchise has 14,352. That's not a small gap. That's the difference between a book people seek out and books people pick up.

One honest wrinkle: the fourth Litwin book, Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, sits at 4.18, right in the middle of the Dean pack. So this isn't really a story about two authors.

It's a story about the three books that are songs.

The Numbers

Goodreads ratings, pulled from the twenty-two most-popular Pete the Cat titles. Highlighted rows are the three I'd start with.

In Fairness to the Deans

That table is not the whole picture, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I left it there.

The Deans are writing a different job.

Most of those later titles are I Can Read leveled readers, sticker books, lift-the-flaps, and holiday tie-ins. Those are supposed to be simple. A My First I Can Read about a lost tooth is not trying to be a song a room of preschoolers screams along to, and rating it against one isn't fair to either book.

If your kid is six and learning to read on their own, the Dean I Can Read line is genuinely useful, and the fact that there are dozens of them is the point. A kid who loves Pete can read Pete for two straight years without running out.

And Missing Cupcakes at 4.39 across 9,000 ratings shows the ceiling is still there when the book is aiming high.

So: Litwin for the read-aloud. Dean for the reading practice, the holidays, and the kid who wants more Pete.

How to Tell Them Apart in the Library

Flip to the cover credit.

The Litwin books say "Story by Eric Litwin" with "Art by James Dean" underneath. Everything else says James Dean or Kimberly Dean.

That's it. Ten seconds, and you know which kind of book you're holding.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Here's what I think actually happened with this series, and I say it as somebody who has spent thirty years trying to get a room of six-year-olds to make noise on cue.

Litwin didn't write books. He wrote bits.

A bit has a structure. Setup, repeat, escalate, and a hook the audience can do with you. Those three books all run the same bit: something goes wrong, you ask the room a question, the room answers, and then everybody sings the line again.

Did Pete cry?

Goodness, no.

That's not a plot beat. That's a call and response, and it works for the same reason it's worked on stage since forever. The audience gets a job.

Which is why these read so badly silently and so well out loud. If you read I Love My White Shoes in a flat voice to yourself, you'll wonder what the fuss is. Do it in front of nine four-year-olds with the song and a stretched-out vowel and you'll understand the sixty thousand ratings.

Learn the tune. It's free online, Litwin sings it himself, and it takes four minutes to learn.

Don't make the kids wait for you to finish the sentence. Stop before the question and let them shout the answer. That pause is the whole trick, and it's the hardest part for adults, who tend to want to keep things moving.

Let it sit.

Then go.

Readit's Review

I like the buttons one best.

Because you get to count backwards AND he keeps losing things.

Also his buttons pop off and he doesn't even care.

Who is that relaxed?

I looked at some of the other Pete books and they're fine but some of them are just Pete doing an activity.

Pete goes to the beach.

Pete has lunch.

Okay.

I like the ones where something goes WRONG and he sings about it anyway.

That's the good version of Pete.

Also eighty-seven books is too many books. Somebody should check on that cat.

For Teachers and Librarians

The three Litwin titles are read-aloud workhorses: call and response, color and counting built in, an audible refrain, and a song recording available for free. Rocking in My School Shoes is a first-week-of-school standard for a reason.

I Love My White Shoes is Guided Reading Level K, ATOS 1.5, grades PreK to 1. It took a Picture Book Honor in the 2011 E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards and the 2011 Missouri Building Block Picture Book Award, which Missouri schoolchildren vote on themselves.

For independent reading, the Dean I Can Read line runs from My First through Level 1, which covers a lot of ground for a classroom library and keeps a Pete-obsessed kid supplied for years.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs, for the three song books

Performed properly, the Litwin three are as reliable as read-alouds get. Singing, shouting, guessing, and a cat who will not be rattled by anything.

The rest of the shelf varies, and some of it is doing a quieter job on purpose.

So the score is for the three. Sing them and you've got a four. Read them flat and you've got a pamphlet about footwear.

Final Explorer Verdict

If you're buying one Pete the Cat book, buy Four Groovy Buttons or I Love My White Shoes.

If you're buying for a first day of school, Rocking in My School Shoes.

If your kid is learning to read on their own and already loves Pete, the Dean I Can Read books are the right tool and there are plenty of them.

And whichever you pick, do it out loud. This is not a series that rewards a quiet reader.

If a book that turns storytime into a group activity is what your kid responds to, that's the same thing I built Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book around. The narrator insists there are no dinosaurs. The pictures say otherwise. The kids get to be the ones who can see, and they will tell you about it.

Pete gets a song.

Dangerous Dave gets corrected.

Both of them end up with a loud room.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit