Read A Cat Called Alfie free in the Little Reads app.
Rachel Wells's A Cat Called Alfie is a chatty street story for 11 year olds, told by a grey cat who simply can't resist a removal van.
Alfie is a doorstep cat. That means he has more than one home on Edgar Road and more than one family feeding him (he'd tell you that's just good sense).
He's settled now. But when two men start carrying boxes into number 48 in the middle of the night, he has to know why.
His best friend Tiger thinks he's being nosy. She's probably right! Still, the house sits empty for days after the boxes arrive, and the whole street starts to wonder.
When the new family finally turn up, something is clearly wrong. The dad looks sad and the mum looks frazzled. The teenage son won't say a word. The older girl has a faraway look that Alfie has seen before. And their cat is the most beautiful creature he's ever laid eyes on. She's also incredibly rude to him.
You hear all of it from Alfie, and he's lovely company. He's a bit vain and very pleased with himself. He thinks humans are funny creatures who can't even find their own trainers. And he takes his job of looking after everyone VERY seriously.
There's a great gang of neighbourhood cats too. Nellie loves a drama, Tiger is fierce and bossy, and nobody wants to bump into Salmon, a bully of a cat who belongs to the street's biggest busybodies.
It's worth saying that this reads like a grown-up book in places, because a lot of it is grown-up conversation. The humans chat about trying for a baby, beer and post-natal depression, and there's a crude joke about pregnancy. Salmon's owners run the Neighbourhood Watch and say nasty, prejudiced things about foreigners moving in (the other neighbours are horrified, and the book is plainly on their side).
If your reader is happy to skim the adult chat to get back to the cats, Alfie will win them over. If they'd rather everything was pitched at them, it may feel slow in places.
Want to know how he became a doorstep cat in the first place? Alfie the Doorstep Cat goes back to the start, when he's a pampered lap cat who suddenly has nowhere to go.
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