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'Jake and Pete is a road story for cats. Having learnt cat talk, Gillian Rubinstein tells a wonderfully funny and scary tale of two kitkids who go out into the world and find it full of dogs, cars, brooms, boots and snakes, when what they really want is a mice home with a big fridge.' (Publication summary)
'Jake and Pete and the Drain Boggart, Bog, are up to their usual adventures. Jake's sense of smell returns in the Garden of Lost Things and Pete grows more and more disgruntled with his poor vision. As Jake tries to adjust to a world of strange scents and odours, Pete reveals a dark-side as his hostility and anger mounts. On top of this, the unlikely trio are off to a magpie's wedding! And, as Bog explains to the kittwins, it is a very special honour indeed to be invited to a magpie's wedding. What will they give for a gift? How will Pete behave while he is in this mood? Will poor Pete ever see again?' (Publication summary)
Mills examines three of Rubinstein's children's books, Keep Me Company (1992), Jake and Pete (1995), and Jake and Pete and the Stray Dogs (1997), in the light of psychiatrist John Bowlby's writing on Attachment Theory and Separation Anxiety, arguing that despite offering a helpful context for reading the texts, 'aspects of the picture story books[s] remain outside his theoretical framework (7). Bowlby is notably silent regarding Freud's Oedipus complex, nor does he 'theorize the body' in any detail and Mills looks at the texts in relation to the gaps between the the two approaches (7). She extends the reading beyond the Bowlbian paradigm for mother-child separation anxiety revealing a much darker message regarding anxiety, loss and death, in the texts, stating that, 'In so far as the books explore a child's separation anxiety by way of animals' troubles, the happy endings are a fragile fiction' (9).
Mills examines three of Rubinstein's children's books, Keep Me Company (1992), Jake and Pete (1995), and Jake and Pete and the Stray Dogs (1997), in the light of psychiatrist John Bowlby's writing on Attachment Theory and Separation Anxiety, arguing that despite offering a helpful context for reading the texts, 'aspects of the picture story books[s] remain outside his theoretical framework (7). Bowlby is notably silent regarding Freud's Oedipus complex, nor does he 'theorize the body' in any detail and Mills looks at the texts in relation to the gaps between the the two approaches (7). She extends the reading beyond the Bowlbian paradigm for mother-child separation anxiety revealing a much darker message regarding anxiety, loss and death, in the texts, stating that, 'In so far as the books explore a child's separation anxiety by way of animals' troubles, the happy endings are a fragile fiction' (9).
