THE CATS OF CUCKOO SQUARE

Newly fledged chapter-book readers will gloat along with the funny, furry narrators in these two tales of feline triumph. In “Blossom’s Revenge,” open warfare ensues when sly, spoiled six-year-old Prissy Pinkerton comes for a stay. As Blossom tells it, Prissy is determined to make her life miserable. She manages always to seem to be the innocent, when, in fact, she’s the instigator. But even Prissy’s no match for a flour-coated “ghost cat,” or a mouse in her mashed potatoes. In the second story, sudden fame comes to sedate old “Picasso Perkins” when a visiting art gallery owner sees a sheaf of children’s cat sketches decorated with pawprints. The language is droll and sly, “but even at my advanced age, I am quite nippy on my feet in an emergency and thankfully, Lexie cannot follow me through the cat flap.” Ross (Little Wolf, Forest Detective, p. 948, etc.) sprinkles comic, ink drawings liberally through Geras’s large-type text, perfectly capturing the cats’ sense of weary—no, lazy—superiority. Fans of Lauber’s Purrfectly Purrfect: Life at the Acatemy (2000) will purr over this, too. (Fiction. 7-10)