Take It Away, Tommy! is smart, cat humor with a side of puns

Georgia Dunn gets cats. She also gets people and the qualities that make us laugh at the anthropomorphic things cats will do. Take It Away, Tommy! is the fourth book in the Breaking Cat News Adventure series of books that shows people what our cats are probably thinking if their lives are akin to a news themed version of The Truman Show.

For us this series has only gotten better. Lupin Leaps In, the third book in the series was enjoyable. Take It Away, Tommy! was enjoyable, had us grinning from start to finish and made us laugh. Our 10 year-old said that he liked the previous two books better. When I pressed him why, he just squirmed, muttered something about liking the other cats better and continued chasing and/or annoying his younger brother.

In an attempt to sound older….and as he sees me writing this down. He said that he liked the fuzzy white cat the best and is now off to find his younger brother to chase and/or annoy him.

Take It Away, Tommy! feels like an old school comic strip with modern day wry, observational humor. The cats in question live with or near a pair of humans. There’s always a news anchor or two that are conducting interviews, moderating cat reporters or commenting on the bizarre behavior of the two-legged species that are getting in their way or feeding them.

This third volume feels more mature. Mature might not be the correct word while talking about cats who are hosting their own news network. It’s more polished and the story is more focused and easier to follow. This is a collection of the comic strips that Dunn has previously published. There is something fresh about seeing a comic strip that I don’t read daily collected together.  There are story threads, for instance the cats see a ghost and the people think that their apartment is haunted. It also goes through the season, with fall, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve all being shown from their perspective.

How cats interpret our smart phones. What’s up with baby toys? Why do cats want to comb our hair or sleep on our heads at night are also prime areas for Tommy and his cat friends to play with.

The humor in Take It Away, Tommy! is accessible for readers who are 10 and up. It will help if those ages understand cats. There are numerous instances where the cats do something that is not adult, but is something adults would understand more easily. It’s quite probable that those panels are ones that our son didn’t, but they’re the ones that we certainly grinned the hardest at. Breaking Cat News is one of those strips that make you want to go back to the days when everyone got the newspaper and that page was one of the first ones you’d look at. This collection of strips will do the trick for those who want a sly look at cats, life or life with cats.

There are affiliate links in this post, because, cats.