Any cat owner might wonder what thoughts fill their pets’ hours spent home alone. Frank and Vida Radice imagined an almost plausible answer, partnered with acclaimed artist Charles Fazzino, and then turned it into a children’s book, “Sam Katz on the Loose.”

Using their feline main character, Sam Katz, “a black-and-white boy, just the slightest bit fat,” as a platform from which to leap, the Radices take the reader (and young listener) on a rhyming romp through nine vignettes as Sam’s imagination leads you through the pictures that hang on the walls of his home. This, you see, is his escape into a day full of sights and sounds, without ever going outside, or even leaping off the couch.

“Sam Katz on the Loose” is a literary metaphor on the transporting powers of art. With each page, Fazzino literally and figuratively illustrates Sam’s in-depth experience of the different scenes with flat drawings that become three-dimensional with the gentle pull of a side tab. For a child, listening to a book can either be a passive experience or a stimulating one. Each adventure is enhanced by Fazzino with visual details galore to engage a young readers, and enough wit to tickle a more mature reader (at the zoo, a gorilla with an eye for accessories is my favorite example).

Often feeling as left out of the larger adult world as an indoor cat might, children can relate to Sam’s desire to explore and his way of pretending to achieving this. After all, who could be a better tour guide for an adventurous young mind than a curious cat!

Plus, there is always an inherent value to children’s books that humanize animals – it reminds the next generation that, hey, pets are people too.