A Kitten Called Holly

Helen Peters' A Kitten Called Holly is a warm animal story for 7 year olds about a tiny black kitten whose mother leaves her behind.

What happens

Jasmine and her best friend Tom have found the perfect clubhouse, an old brick shed at the bottom of her garden. It's going to be the home of their Animal Rescue Club (A.R.C. for short, like Noah's Ark), where they'll plan the rescue centre they want to run one day.

Then a furious grey cat shoots in through the door and scratches Jasmine's hands. Behind a straw bale are three tiny kittens. Jasmine and Tom have scared off their mother. When she comes back, she carries two of the kittens away to a new hiding place. The little black one she leaves behind.

Luckily, Jasmine's mum is a vet. So there's kitten milk from a syringe every three hours, a shoebox bed with a mini hot water bottle, and a flea comb (poor Tom ends up covered in bites). Tom names the kitten Holly, after the holly bush outside the shed.

There's just one problem. Jasmine has promised her parents she won't keep any more animals, so Holly will have to go to a new home once she's old enough. And Tom's mum can't stand cats. Can the two of them find a way?

It's a gentle, very real story about looking after an animal. Your reader learns right alongside Jasmine how to feed a kitten, how to burp her and how to introduce her to the family's other cats. And there's plenty of Holly pouncing on toy mice and chasing ping-pong balls, which is just lovely.

Family life is funny too. Jasmine's little brother Manu keeps a collection of animal bones in his bedroom, and forgets to mention until breakfast that he has to go to school dressed as Samuel Pepys.

There's a moment of worry early on, when Mum warns that a kitten left behind by her mother might not be completely healthy. It's handled kindly and honestly, and it's exactly the kind of thing an animal-mad child will want to know.

What to read next

This is the fourth of Jasmine's animal stories. If they fall for her, go back to where her rescues began with A Piglet Called Truffle, which starts on a neighbour's farm with a litter of newborn piglets.