Lessons for teens, and an anxious cat

In Rob Scotton's new book, Splat the Cat makes it through the first day of school. (''Splat the Cat'')

Splat the Cat
By Rob Scotton
HarperCollins, 40 pp., ages 3-7, $16.99

House of Dance
By Beth Kephart
HarperTeen, 272 pp., ages 13-18, $16.99

Undercover
By Beth Kephart
HarperTeen, 288 pp., ages 13-18, $16.99

Rob Scotton's latest picture book, "Splat the Cat," speaks for every child fearfully approaching the first day of school. For "wide awake" Splat, it was "his first day at Cat School, and his tail wiggled wildly with worry." Splat comes up with reasonable excuses for staying home: "I'm having a bad hair day," "The lamppost won't get out of my way." Lucky he brings his pet mouse, Seymour, along.

"Splat the Cat" has stellar comic qualities in common with Mo Willems's "Knuffle Bunny" - notably in the wild abbreviated dashes at character on each illustrated page. Splat dances bug-eyed through most of the book, yet Scotton manages, by a twist of Splat's tail, to suggest wide-ranging emotions. Splat hounds his teacher with questions: " 'Why do we chase mice?' . . . 'It's what we do,' replied Mrs. Wimpydimple. 'Why?' asked Splat. 'Because.' 'Why? Why? Why? Why?' " There's something absolutely irresistible about "Splat the Cat" that goes beyond its sly humor, its cartoony elegance, Saturday-morning exaggerations, its black-white-and-gray palette shimmying with color. Some writer-illustrators have the pulse of children beating wildly but surely in them. This manic romp of a book proves that Scotton is one of the chosen.

National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart's "House of Dance" follows on the heels of her brilliant young-adult debut novel, "Undercover." Rosie, the young heroine of "House of Dance," is left alone while her mother chases a dream of happiness. "Sometimes Mom didn't get home until midnight. Sometimes she was, in the softest voice, singing. Sometimes she forgot that I was there at all, and that is why what happened happened. Because I had been put in charge of myself, and my grandfather was dying."

Rosie grows up faster and higher than most adults ever do, and she learns to dance while doing it. The vehicle of ballroom dance is less successful than the pond skating that Kephart employed in "Undercover," and Rosie's dance school - House of Dance - a less convincing place. Still, Kephart is a beautiful writer, a gatherer of fine details: "Even the tomato pincushion that Miss Marie wore on her wrist was the same; so was the little pair of silver scissors that hung from a ribbon like a necklace." Kephart writes with a poet's compression: "The sky was a spool of dark cotton candy, and the windows in the apartments above the stores had been pulled shut." She also has an uncanny eye for setting and weather: "Already the heat of the day was roofing over everything - the buildings, cars, and sidewalks, the people and the trains. The heat was there, and above the heat was the sky, and in between the heat and the sky a few birds flew."

In "House of Dance" Kephart handles many things deftly: the looming presence of death; the forgiveness between parents and children; companionable silence among people who love and understand one another. But for a true taste of her gifts, I'd advise readers to turn to "Undercover."

Elisa, high school's answer to Cyrano de Bergerac, composes love poems and love notes for other people's heartthrobs, observing their tumultuous lives while remaining the outsider, with her "altogether sensible-looking eyes," her father's "pinprick freckles. And believe it or not . . . his double earlobe." A poet and nature lover to the core, she believes she isn't missing anything till Theo approaches, asking for material with which to court the dainty school beauty, Lila. "Language," Elisa decides, "is not a bottomless well, and also - it gets tedious, being on love's lookout for others."

"Undercover" begins in autumn but feels entirely wintry. There's the icy beauty of the solitary pond where Elisa teaches herself not only how to skate but to find the courage she needs to live life firsthand. "Undercover" is full of deftness and poetry - perhaps, at times, a touch too much poetry, forced on the reader - but it possesses moments of genuine lyrical beauty: "Outside, the moon seemed pushed forward in the sky, like it was looking for some kind of attention." Its most enchanting scenes take place as Elisa teaches herself, step by halting step, to fly and glide across the ice, to feel graceful, even beautiful.

Elisa's longing for Theo is palpable. As comical and self-ironic as she is ("You are born or you're not born with a talent for hair; I came out on the loser's side"), she is not immune to desire: "I felt my heart pounding, pounding. . . . Maybe it's strangeness that makes for real friendship, something neither of you rightly understands, for one blink of one instant, in the brilliant, dark woods. Theo was right there, his chin above my shoulder. Theo was right there - and nothing. Nothing."

In the end, "Undercover" is about coming out of hiding, coming up for air. It's also a page-turner, without any of the cheesiness that term implies. "Undercover" is a book bright, lonely teenagers will treasure with fierce affection.

Liz Rosenberg reviews children's books monthly for the Globe.