What Pet Should I Get? by Dr. Seuss Review: A Remarkable Posthumous Discovery for Young Readers

What Pet Should I Get? is a Dr. Seuss picture book aimed at early readers ages three to six. It follows Jay and Kay — the same brother-and-sister duo who appear in Seuss's classic One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish — on a visit to a pet store where they must choose just one pet before the clock strikes noon. As Wikipedia's entry on the book notes, the pair consider a vast array of possible animals, building to a deadline-driven tension before ultimately settling on a choice whose identity is left tantalizingly unrevealed. The story is structured as a classic Seussian dilemma: the simple, universal childhood experience of wanting everything and having to pick only one thing.

The book's backstory is as compelling as its contents. After Theodor Seuss Geisel died in 1991, his wife Audrey Geisel and assistant Claudia Prescott eventually sorted through his papers, donating the bulk of his archive to the University of California, San Diego. A small box of unfinished material was set aside rather than donated, and it was not until October 2013 that Geisel and Prescott examined those remaining items closely. Among them — alongside alphabet flash card illustrations and a folder Seuss himself had labeled "Noble Failures" — was the most complete project in the box: a manuscript called The Pet Shop, comprising 16 illustrations and accompanying typed text. Cathy Goldsmith, a Random House associate publishing director who had served as art director on the previous six Seuss books and is reportedly the last Random House executive to have worked directly with Seuss, authenticated the manuscript and dated it to between 1958 and 1962, partly on the basis of the Jay and Kay characters matching those in One Fish, Two Fish. Goldsmith then reconstructed the manuscript for publication and colored the original black-and-white illustrations, and Random House published it in July 2015 as What Pet Should I Get?

The book's place in Seuss's body of work is genuinely fascinating. Wikipedia's account raises the possibility that Seuss may have conceived The Pet Shop before One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, later deciding to use Jay and Kay in a less narrative-structured book instead. Whether or not that sequence holds, the connection between the two books gives What Pet Should I Get? a retroactive depth for readers already familiar with the 1960 classic — it functions both as a standalone early reader and as an unofficial companion to one of Seuss's most enduring titles. As part of the Classic Seuss and Beginner Books series published by Random House Books for Young Readers, the book sits squarely within the tradition Seuss built across decades.

Critical coverage critic Maria Russo gave the book a largely positive review, describing it as "a very good example of his particular genius for distilling both the spirit of his times and the timeless mind-set of children" — a measured but meaningful endorsement from a major outlet. That the reconstructed text reads as authentically Seussian is itself a tribute to both the quality of the original manuscript and the careful work of Goldsmith's reconstruction. For families with young children in the target reading age range, the central tension — wanting every pet but being allowed only one — maps directly onto experiences children know well, which has been a hallmark of Seuss's appeal since the earliest Beginner Books.

The book does carry a specific limitation that some readers and critics have noted. Critics observed that the pet-store premise — treating animals as items to be browsed and selected — is "thoroughly outmoded," and that the framing of pets as interchangeable commodities clashes with contemporary attitudes toward animal adoption. Random House's own edition addresses this directly with a publisher's note encouraging children to find pets at shelters, but as The Guardian pointed out, that earnest caveat sits in some tension with Seuss's characteristically anarchic spirit. Russo's critical coverage review also drew a mild distinction, noting the book is "if not top-flight Seuss" — suggesting that even admirers place it a step below his very best work, as one would expect of a manuscript that was never fully finished or revised by its author. Readers approaching it as a polished, author-approved final work should calibrate their expectations accordingly: this is a remarkable recovery, not a rediscovered masterpiece on the level of The Cat in the Hat.