Home for Hairy, A

A Home for Hairy
by Maureen Ulrich, Illustrated by Brenda Blackburn
Published by Flatlands Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.99 ISBN 9781069113511

What I know about Saskatchewan’s Maureen Ulrich is that she understands how to engage readers, her genres and subject matter are varied, and her children’s picture books—ie: Sam and the Big Bridge, which I previously reviewed—are delightfully heartwarming.

Ulrich, a former teacher, recently released another moving story for young readers. A Home for Hairy is a softcover featuring a foul-breathed cat (Hairy) with low self-esteem, and Alison, a busy healthcare worker and weekend-warrior (aka adventurer) who takes a chance on fostering the scruffy-looking feline at the animal shelter, and welcomes him into her life.

Though Hairy’s weekdays are spent inside young Alison’s brick apartment building while she’s at work or reading medical texts and crashing, exhausted on her couch (the illustration for this page shows her asleep on her couch with phone in hand, kitty litter escaping the cat box, and household chores undone), he enjoys “watching the world go by” from his windowsill perch, and during the weekends he and Alison get up to outdoor adventures like hiking, canoeing, and, when winter blows in, snow-boarding. These are daring and questionable activities for domestic cats, and regarding snowboarding, “It turned out Hairy didn’t like this adventure at all. Icicles froze to his whiskers as Alison whooshed down the hill.”

The book’s illustrated by Brenda Blackburn, an Estevan-area artist, who, like Ulrich, is a retired teacher and cat lover. Her full-colour, full-bleed illustrations “were created with Berol Prismacolor pencil crayons on Dura-lar polyester film,” and she ably demonstrates Hairy’s various emotions—sadness, surprise, worry, contentment, fear, joy and love—through his expressive green eyes and different-on-every-page postures. (The image of wide-eyed Hairy in Alison’s blue backpack as she cycles him home from the animal shelter gave me a chuckle: it’s not unlike my own dog’s expression when we took him tobogganing.)

Though orange Hairy may not agree with all of orange-haired Alison’s adventures, the fostered cat quickly becomes comfortable in her “sunny window,” and perpetually fears the return to the shelter. “He hoped he would never have to leave her,” Ulrich writes, next to illustrations that show a dripping and life-vested Hairy in a canoe, and Hairy walking across snow in cat-sized snowshoes.

Often there’s a blatant “moral to the story” with children’s books, and I appreciate that this author doesn’t make the moral obvious. We sense that outside of work, Alison is mostly alone, and she confides in Hairy that “Before [he] came into [her] life, she was lonely and exhausted.” She says the rescue was mutual, and alludes to doing “̒more stuff with [Hairy] next summer.’” The takeaways—I won’t call them morals—are multiple: never give up, take a chance, life’s better with someone—or some cat—to share it with.

And what forthcoming adventure does fearless Alison have planned? Blackburn’s final illustration is a metaphorical exclamation mark, and a fitting end to this lovely story, dedicated, in part, to healthcare workers and rescue cats. Like all the best kids’ books, adults will enjoy it, too.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM