A TRAVELING CAT

Some cats are born to travel, and such a one is Boulevard, who appears at a drive-in one evening, stays with the young narrator and her family for a year, then leaves as the spring floods arrive. In Lyon’s modest text, the child’s attachment to her foundling comes through clearly, as does her wistful acceptance at the end that it’s not in Boulevard’s nature to be a pet. With colored pencils, Johnson produces impressionistic scenes of a semi-rural 1950s setting through which Boulevard, small and dark, pads with composure; she bears and raises a litter of kittens, watches squirrels out the window from a perch on the dryer, shows the dog who’s boss, then moves on, a solitary figure on a curving country road. It’s rare to find such a distinctly drawn animal character without a trace of an anthropomorphic trait, but Boulevard is through and through a cat among cats. (Picture book. 5-7)