My Life as a Cat

Carlie Sorosiak's My Life as a Cat is a funny, tender story for 9 year olds about an alien who comes to Earth to be a human and lands as a scruffy black cat instead.

What happens

Leonard has waited nearly three hundred years for this. Where he's from, everyone is pure energy and thinks as one big hive, so nobody has hands or feelings or a name. When they turn three hundred, each of them gets a month on Earth, and he's planned his for decades. He'll be a park ranger in Yellowstone, with boots, a moustache and a year's worth of jokes.

Then he gets distracted practising a knock-knock joke on the way down, drifts off course and starts sprouting a tail. He crash-lands in a tree in a storm. As a cat. Thousands of miles from where he's meant to be.

Luckily a girl called Olive rows out in the flood to rescue him (shouting something he's pretty sure is "I've come to shave you"). She and her tough, shrimp-boat-captain grandma take him in. But if Leonard isn't back at his exact pick-up point in Yellowstone by the end of the month, he's stuck on Earth forever.

It's SO funny being inside Leonard's head. He knows loads about humans from watching I Love Lucy, and almost nothing about cats. Do cats moo? How do you eat without filling your whole mouth? Why does he suddenly want to shred the curtains? And he's just as amazed by toasters and eyebrows as he is by the ocean.

Underneath the giggles, it's a lovely story about friendship. Olive is spending the summer with a grandma she barely knows. Her dad died when she was little, and she's worried her mum's new boyfriend doesn't want her around. Leonard doesn't have words, but he listens, and you can feel them both getting a bit less lonely.

It's worth knowing the book opens with a goodbye, jumping ahead to a midnight drive where Leonard knows he's going to forget how everything felt. It's gentle, but it may tug at a soft-hearted reader.

If your reader likes funny animals with big thoughts, this one is a real gem.

What to read next

If they fall for Leonard, I, Cosmo is by the same author. It's told by an old golden retriever who adores his human family (and has very firm opinions about Halloween costumes).