Promotional Information

From the winner of the Blue Peter Award, this is a funny, dark and exciting story about what it's like to wake up as a cat!

About the Author

Matt Haig is a British author for children and adults. His memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks. His children's novels have won the Smarties Gold Medal, the Blue Peter Book of the Year, been shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and nominated for the Carnegie Medal three times.

His books have received praise from Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, Jeanette Winterson, Joanne Harris, Patrick Ness, Ian Rankin and SJ Watson, among others. The Guardian summed up his writing as 'funny, clever and quite, quite lovely' by The Times and the New York Times called him 'a writer of great talent'.

He assures us he has never, ever been a cat, despite rumours he was once a rather grumpy ginger moggy named Jeffrey.

Reviews

A clawed masterpiece . . . A book about being comfortable in your own skin rather than someone else's fur
*Guardian*

Darkly comic and richly rewarding . . . Shines with originality
*Telegraph*

I loved To Be A Cat . . . Very funny and surprising
*John Boyne*

Here is the black comedy that made Matt Haig's Shadow Forest so irresistible
*The Times*

A terrific yarn
*Independent on Sunday*

Gr 4-6-Barney Willow has a lot on his mind: his dad has disappeared from their small British town, his mom is constantly working, and he has become the target for the aggressions of both the school bully and the terrifying principal, Miss Whipmire. He finds solace in his best friend, but even that friendship is not enough to cancel out the misery of his 12th birthday when Miss Whipmire threatens to expel him from school. He sees a cat on his way home and thinks about how easy its life must be, wishing aloud that he could trade places with it. The next morning, Barney wakes up to find himself in the cat's body, and he quickly learns how difficult the day-to-day existence of an animal can be. As he navigates the feline world, he discovers the truth about Miss Whipmire, his father, and the bully, and he finds out that maybe being a human boy is not as awful as it seems. Peppered with quirky illustrations, the story features extreme characters and circumstances in the tradition of Roald Dahl, though it lacks some of the spark of his work. Nonetheless, Haig's cautionary tale is a unique one, and Barney's struggles will be understood by readers who are uncomfortable in their own skin.-Sarah Reid, Broome County Public Library, Binghamton, NY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.