Although their perspectives on rainstorms and tree climbing may differ, a dog and a cat don't let this mar their close friendship in Brendan Wenzel's rhyming picture-book charmfest Two Together, in which the unlikely twosome share a timeless and relatable goal: to get home safely.
As a dog and a cat head home together on foot, they encounter the ordinary ("Two together much to see./ Unknown sounds. Smells on trees") and the relatively dramatic: they run into a toad, cross a stream, wake a bear, escape through a swamp, and so on, until finally, "Two together see a light!/ All is dark. Home is bright." Curled up together by the fireside, the companions even dream together: an illustration shows them running from the house and into the darkness, presumably in search of more adventure.
Simple, supple rhymes are just right for this old-fashioned, uncomplicated tale of friendship, but there's nothing atavistic about the art. As he did in They All Saw a Cat and Hello Hello, Wenzel throws a kitchen sink's worth of media at the page to see what sticks, and the answer is well, practically everything (but, according to the books cataloging page, "mostly acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, and a computer"). Scenes viewed by the dog, who has rounded edges and a painted appearance, have a likewise round-edged-and-painted appearance; art showing the cat's perspective is, like the cat, sketch-like and shaded with what looks like colored pencil. Two Together is here to say that a marvelous whole can be spun from disparate elements--whether what's under consideration is artistic technique or a cross-species friendship. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author