Review: MY CAT CALLED RED by Jane Lightbourne

 

My Cat Called Red by Jane Lightbourne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Red is an extraordinary cat. When he turns up on Robin’s doorstep one night the little boy doesn’t realise how magical the cat’s powers are.

For Red has a magic purr. But he’s been on a journey, a search for his forever home, and with all the danger and the excitement that has accompanied that, he’s come to lose his purr.

How?

The troubled Robin won’t rest until he knows Red’s story.

And so his grandfather tells it to him.

Mid-grade chapter book My Cat Called Red is a heartwarming adventure story by author Jane Lightbourne, about friendship and courage in the face of danger, featuring the magical cat Red and the purr that transforms children’s lives. The ebook topped the Amazon Hot New Release charts when it first came out and has been an Amazon category bestseller in several categories, reaching the number 2 spot in the UK and number 1 in Australia across its categories. Designed for children aged 8 to 12, My Cat Called Red is a modern classic that will appeal to all ages.

A percentage of profit from sales of the first edition of the paperback will be donated to the National Literacy Trust.

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Firstly, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book. I hadn't heard of this writer before, but I'm a sucker for animal stories and children's stories/middlegrade so I requested this book as soon as I saw it and was delighted to receive a copy.

This tells the story of Robin, a troubled boy following his mother's death, and how he's sent around various relatives until he lives with his grandfather. There, he meets an abandoned red cat, and the grandfather proceeds to tell the red cat's life story. And, wow, this is a sad story at times. It does get dark--and I did wonder just how appropriate this would be for younger children, given I think this is aimed at seven-year-olds. (I would've recommended it for being slightly older kids, as you've got a lot of rhetoric on death and grief--which made me, a woman in her late twenties tearful at times--as well as talk of animal cruelty, such as how some kittens are drowned and/or killed when they're not wanted.) But this is a good book to give to children to teach them about these difficult themes--life, death, grief, etc, and of course animal cruelty. In fact, I don't think I've come across a children's book before that tackles it so directly.

The framing of the cat's narrative is folded within Robin's story, via the grandfather telling the tale. It does give it a Chinese Box frame narrative, similar to that in Wuthering Heights, so this book is definitely well structured. I could see a lot of care had gone into the writing of this.

There are quite a lot of characters in this too, as the red cat tells of how he's gone from home to home, and a couple of times I got a bit lost or mixed up a few of these characters when they were later referred back to.

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