Some members of my family like Garfield. Some members of my family LOVE Garfield. So, I’m sure we’ll be going to see “The Garfield Movie” repeatedly. It’s an origin story, with Chris Pratt voicing Garfield, which includes a reunion and reconciliation with his absent father.

To help my kids with their love of all things Garfield, I’m delighted to share these books spun off from the movie with them. Each features stories and other elements from the movie, yet they feature different story elements to different audiences. I’ll try to briefly explain each to help you buy books for the Garfield fans at your house!

A Little Golden Book: The Garfield Movie — Little Cat, Big Dreams
The film gets the Golden Book treatment, which features the origin story segment about Jon finding the cute kitten version of Garfield while dining at an Italian restaurant. It’s a heartwarming beginning that helps explain many elements of the Garfield ethos, including his love of lasagna! The illustrations are original and cute, and the story is compelling. It’s a fun way for young movie fans to learn to read while reliving Garfield’s origin story, in the keepsake Golden Book format.

Step Into Reading (2): The Garfield Movie: One Lucky Cat
This is a fun, easy-to-read book for beginning readers. The text is simple and printed in a large font to make it easy for young children to read. The book introduces each of the movie’s major characters in a fun way. The images are stills taken from the movie, so the relationship between the book and the beloved movie is clear and engaging.

The Garfield Movie: Living the Dream
This paperback version of the movie is written for older children, and briefly encompasses the entire story of the movie, explaining some of the meaningful thematic moments, too. The illustrations are screencaps from the movie, too, so it’s a great way to revisit a favorite film.

The Garfield Movie: Official Activity Book
This book offers stickers, crossword puzzles, word search activities, different posters, and other fun activities for Garfield fans of all ages. It’s fairly large and extended, with lots of value, color, and production quality throughout. Each page has a matte finish, so kids can use any writing or coloring utensil to write or draw in it, yet the paper is thicker than I expected. It’s all well designed, printed, and bound, with the stickers being particularly well-made — worth the price of admission alone.

The Garfield Movie: The Junior Novelization
This is a young person retelling of the movie, in detail, written in a clever and engaging style. The author did a notably great job at this, since the dialog and story feature a great many comical asides from Garfield, as he makes funny wisecracks about, well, everything. Plus, the different aspects of communicating in the Garfield universe are also handled clearly and well, including the talking-and-hearing, talking-and-not-hearing, not-talking-yet-mind-reading anyway, and the other aspects of communication in this people with semi-talking animals tale. This is a fun way to help your children learn to read longer books with more sustained and complicated storylines. I particularly like how the author made the thematic moments clear, which are sometimes based more on our empathy for the characters and their predicaments than they are spelled out in dialog. Altogether, it’s a lot for any author to juggle successfully, yet this is a remarkably strong junior novelization just the same.

Altogether these books from The Garfield Movie universe are bound to capture the attention of young readers, while offering enjoyment to Garfield fans of all ages.