Amazon / Books & Comics / DICK WHITTINGTON AND HIS CAT
REVIEW
Dick Whittington and His Cat is a tidy bedtime telling of a 600-year-old story.
Tidels turns the medieval London folk tale into a short Fire-tablet storybook — clean illustrations, narration, and a tap-to-read structure aimed squarely at five-to-eight-year-olds.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Dick Whittington and His Cat
TIDELS
OUR SCORE
6.8
AMAZON
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
Dick Whittington walked to London in the 1370s, made a fortune from a cat the king of Barbary needed for his rats, married the daughter of his master, and served four terms as Lord Mayor. The story has been told to English children for six hundred years. Tidels has packaged it as a free Fire-tablet storybook, narrated, illustrated, and offline-capable.
The app does not try to modernise the tale. There are no minigames, no AR overlays, no chatbot Dick Whittington answering questions about medieval shipping routes. It is a picture book that turns pages and reads itself aloud, and for a five-to-eight-year-old at bedtime that is the correct shape.
What it loses on production polish it partly recovers on price and offline reliability — two things that matter on a Fire tablet handed to a kid in the back of a car.
The story is older than every app store combined, and Tidels does not try to modernise it — which is the right call.
FEATURES
The app is a fixed-length picture book of the Dick Whittington legend — the poor country boy who walks to London with his cat, hears the bells of Bow promise he will be Lord Mayor three times (the historical Whittington served four), and gets there by way of a rat-infested foreign court that pays a fortune for the cat. Each spread is a single illustration with a paragraph or two of text underneath. Pages turn with a tap or swipe.
Narration is bundled. A read-aloud voice walks through every spread at a steady pace, and words are highlighted in sync so early readers can follow along. Audio can be turned off for parent-led reading. There are no in-app purchases, no ads inside the story, and no account requirement — the app downloads once and runs entirely offline on a Fire tablet, which is the format's main practical advantage over a YouTube retelling.
Tidels publishes dozens of these folk-tale adaptations on Amazon under a consistent template — Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs — and Dick Whittington follows the same shape. If you have used one Tidels storybook on a Fire, you know what this one looks like.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The story choice is the win. Dick Whittington is one of the great English folk tales and it is genuinely under-told outside the UK — most American kids have never heard it. Getting it onto a Fire tablet for free, with narration that handles the older vocabulary (alderman, scullion, the bells of Bow), is a small public good.
The pacing of the retelling is also right. Tidels keeps the major beats — the cruel cook, the cat sent to sea, the king's rat problem, the marriage to Alice Fitzwarren, the return to London — and trims the medieval digressions that would lose a six-year-old. The result reads in about ten minutes, which is the correct length for a bedtime story on a tablet.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The illustration work is functional rather than charming. Characters have the slightly stiff posed-clipart quality common to budget kids' storybook apps from the early 2010s, and the art has not been refreshed for the higher-resolution Fire HD displays sold in the last few years. Beside a current title from Nosy Crow or Sago Mini, it looks dated.
The narration is clear but flat — a single voice reading at one pace, no character distinction, no music or ambient sound between scenes. Children who have spent time with apps like Storyline Online or the Vooks library will notice the difference immediately. For a free download this is fair; as a centrepiece of a kid's tablet library it is not.
CONCLUSION
Install it for the story, not for the production. Dick Whittington is worth knowing and Tidels has done the basic work of getting it onto a Fire in a form a small child can actually use. Pair it with a livelier app — or a parent doing the voices — and the medieval cat saga will land. As a one-stop bedtime library it will not.