Atticus Claw Lends a Paw

Atticus Claw Lends a Paw by Jennifer Gray is an adventure for 7 year olds starring a reformed cat burglar with the full name Atticus Grammaticus Cattypuss Claw.

What happens

Atticus has gone straight. The Queen made him a Police Cat Sergeant for stopping a gang pinching the Crown Jewels, and he wears his badge on a red handkerchief round his neck.

His first official job is a talk. He has to go to the cats' home and tell the new kittens to stay out of trouble.

It does not go well. The kittens don't want a lecture on being good. They want to know how many things he stole (thousands), what sort of things (diamonds, rubies, pearls) and how he never got caught.

Cornered, Atticus tells them to climb trees, go exploring and play with balls of wool. Then he strolls off to the beach feeling rather pleased with himself.

Your reader will be several steps ahead of him here, which is the fun of it.

Inspector Cheddar gets home that evening covered in soot with twigs sticking out of his ears. The fire brigade spent the afternoon fetching kittens out of a tree. The panda car seats are shredded. Somebody stuffed a ball of wool up the exhaust pipe and it went off in his face.

Atticus is put on dried food, which he thinks tastes like mummified rabbit poo. His ear droops. It droops a lot in this book.

And that's before the real trouble starts. There's a lecture at the big house about a Victorian explorer who kept tarantulas in his pockets and went looking for a lost golden city of cats. Somewhere behind all of it are Atticus's old enemies, a ginger cat called Biscuit and a magpie gang.

The jokes land properly. Everyone is called something daft. The lady who runs the cats' home is Nellie Smellie. The professor is Edmund Verry-Clever. Mr Tucker lost a leg to a giant lobster and misses his beard so much he can't concentrate.

Best of all is Atticus himself, who is brave and clever and also extremely greedy, and who keeps imagining being worshipped on a velvet sofa while someone brings him sardines.

One small thing. The lecture turns spooky for a page or two, with talk of an Egyptian curse and a man doomed to die horribly in that very house. The whole audience goes "Oooohhhh" and it's played for laughs, but a child who worries about curses might want you within reach.

What to read next

Your reader may well want to know how a cat burglar ended up in the police at all. That's in Atticus Claw Breaks the Law, which is in the library. A messenger pigeon finds him asleep in Monte Carlo with a note from a magpie who wants every jewel in town.