Puss in Boots

Eric Blair's Capstone retelling hits the Perrault beats faithfully and keeps vocabulary right at the early-reader sweet spot, so it does its job as a classroom bridge to classics. The problem is that even for a five-year-old the story feels thin—the cat's clever scheming barely has room to breathe, and the ogre scene is over before it starts. Worth pulling from the library but not worth buying.