Shy Cat And The Stuff-The-Bus Challenge by Dian Day & Amanda White

with colors by Jessie Zheng.

So every once in a while, I wade through the cesspool formerly known as Twitter (bear with me, I swear this is going somewhere relevant) to peek at sports banter and celebrity gossip. Occasionally, posts on other topics will cross my feed, usually the fascist-coded, algorithm-pushed bullshit that reminds me why I only use the site for research instead of community nowadays. The most recent thread to enrage me made the absolutely baseless assertion that kids only go hungry because irresponsible parents don’t bother feeding them enough, and that food insecurity is primarily a neurosis.

That kind of nonsense only underscores how important it is for books like Shy Cat And The Stuff-The-Bus Challenge to exist. Dian Day and Amanda White are both members of the Hungry Stories team, which works to highlight food insecurity in North America in creative ways, as a means of advocating for change. This first Shy Cat graphic novel is a terrific way of doing so, as young Mila learns about this complicated issue and, perhaps just as importantly, how to talk about it with the people around her.

Mila lives with her Mom in a two-storey house subdivided into apartments. Mary Elizabeth Bernadette lives downstairs, and a stray cat occasionally makes a nuisance of itself outside. Mila doesn’t mind tho: she loves cats and, with her best friend Kit, visits all the ones in the neighborhood as often as she can.

Kit loves coming over to Mila’s. His mom works long hours, so he often comes to play and have a snack at Mila’s place after school. At first, Mila was taken aback when Kit scarfed down a whole bunch of bananas, his favorite fruit, without asking. Her mom, however, took note and offered him more food, then talked to Mila about hunger after he’d gone home. Mila began to understand some of her friend’s seeming quirks better, but still had lots of questions that her mom — and eventually her Mama, who lives elsewhere — had to think pretty hard about answering.

Aside from hanging out with Kit, Mila’s favorite thing in the world to do is to draw comics revolving around Shy Cat, a superpowered kitty who often tackles the problems that Mila herself sees around her. So when her middle school has a food drive and Kit has a meltdown related to some of the donated food, will Shy Cat (and her mothers) be able to help her work through these events with compassion, curiosity and understanding?

There’s a bit of meandering and a bit of metaphor in this first person narrative, but that only lends itself to the verisimilitude of the story, as a young girl tackles the question of unfairness for pretty much the first time in her life. Her mothers are great at helping her figure it out, and the cat analogies only further underscore the issue for readers who might be fortunate enough never to have encountered hunger in their peers, much less to have experienced it for themselves.

The art is cartoony and cute, and Tia is a character who consistently steals every scene she’s in. The commitment to diversity throughout is outstanding. This is a book that deserves to be in every children’s library, almost as much as food deserves to be in every kid’s pantry.

Shy Cat And The Stuff-The-Bus Challenge by Dian Day & Amanda White was published March 3 2026 by Second Story Press and is available from all good booksellers, including