What Pet Should I Get? by Dr Seuss review - lost title fits easily into the canon

The newly discovered manuscript of a lost Dr Seuss book slots effortlessly alongside the others visually, but the story itself is dated and anxiety-inducing

Score another one for the ad hoc paper filing systems of old. With less fanfare and controversy than the rediscovery of Harper Lee’s manuscript Go Set a Watchman, another juggernaut literary estate recently found itself with a lucrative new classic on its hands. After Dr Seuss died in 1991, his widow Audrey Geisel gathered a collection of sketches and drafts into a box and forgot about them. A couple of years ago, the now 93-year-old Geisel, her longtime assistant and Cathy Goldsmith, the designer who worked on the last six Dr Seuss books, rediscovered them. It turns out they were the skeleton of a complete story. Out of a collection of black-and-white drawings and the faded, typed rhymes taped to the pictures, the team has recreated an almost spookily precise addition to the Seuss canon.

Visually, the “new” children’s book What Pet Should I Get? slots effortlessly onto the shelf with the other volumes in the indispensable Seuss library. The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham revolutionized children’s publishing in the late 1950s and seduced generations of children with hypnotic rhymes and weird, wild creatures. On the cover of the new book, thick black outlines are flooded with a faded palette of blues and yellows, punctuated with spots of red, in floppy bows looped onto a birdcage and around the long neck of a cat. Four animals cluster around a little boy, all beseeching smiles and adoring eyes, while he gazes upwards at the question in the title, eyes wide and faintly worried.

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