MAGIC NIGHT

In this moonlit cat adventure first published in Australia as The Wrong Thing (2006), Lee captures the mysterious hush of a thick-with-magic night in ghostly, luminous pastels. The quietly urgent, deliciously immediate narrative begins when snow-white Hurricane blows in from his seaside wanderings and encounters a tiny, pointy-eared, faun-like intruder in his territory, a houseful of sleeping humans. But when the cat protectively declares, “There is no place for this strange thing,” it doesn’t seem remotely true: In the presence of the “flittery, skittery” fairy, a red-dressed doll has come to life, aquarium fish have sprouted human limbs and once-dead-and-framed insect specimens now carry lanterns. (In fact, readers may struggle at first to determine which of the myriad “strange things” the cat is actually pursuing.) When the faun-fairy pays a personal visit to the baby of the house, the cat intuits that it, too, is a young creature . . . and lost. In a familiar-feeling flip of perspective, the fairy rather abruptly flies back to its similarly pointy-eared parents and tells them, “I found the strangest place.” An edgy, beautifully surreal dreamscape perhaps best saved for daytime. (Picture book. 4-6)