PARIS CAT

Soft, splashy watercolors with that medium’s traditional luminosity limn the streets, markets, parks, and boulevards of Paris, as a calico cat, Alice, searches for her owner, Annie, who is visiting a great-aunt, Isabella. Alice sees a mouse in Great-Auntie Isabella’s garden on the first day of her first trip to Paris, and races after it; soon, she is lost in the city. Alice strolls the market, loses a stray fish to a tomcat, is chased by one of the city’s innumerable dogs and lands on a bateau-mouche when she falls off a bridge (a wordless spread of the fall is realistically and kinetically rendered). Tired, Alice at last falls asleep in a bed of tulips, to be found by Annie and her aunt. The Louvre and Notre Dame form a pleasant backdrop to Baker’s close observations of feline behavior. Annie, in her navy knee socks and beret, is just as appealing as her troublesome pet. (Picture book. 4-8)