The Nine Lives of Furry Purry Beancat 1 – The Pirate Captain’s Cat

Philip Ardagh's The Pirate Captain's Cat is a funny animal adventure for 8 year olds about a cat who wakes up on top of a pirate's hat in the middle of a sea battle.

What happens

That's Furry Purry Beancat's special trick. When she falls asleep she sometimes wakes up in a completely different place and time, in another of her nine lives. She never knows where she is. So she just pretends she does (and she's VERY good at pretending).

This time a cannonball whistles past her beautiful ears. Her human is Captain Topaz of the pirate ship Rapier, and his rival One-Eyed Bart is swinging aboard with his whole crew.

Beancat's best friend here turns out to be a ship's rat called Gordon. Who knew? He has a worried wife called Ethel, a goofy one-eared brother-in-law called Morris and eight naughty children. The littlest, Blue, collects bits of string, and nobody will listen to her very important news.

Her news is that Bart is planning to sink the ship.

So it's up to the animals. There's a pirate who learns the hard way not to call Beancat mangy. There's a scary ginger tomcat called Cannonball who ends up very tied up. And there's a gentle giant of a guard called Ten-Tun, who whispers his real name to Beancat and trusts her to keep it secret.

The narrator chats to your reader all the way through, with little asides about how cats think. Beancat is vain and greedy and extremely proud of her four white paws. Who doesn't know a cat like that?

The rat children are the funniest bit. They answer every question with a chorus of sillier and sillier suggestions, until somebody says "bottom" and everyone falls about laughing. If your reader likes reading aloud, these pages are made for it.

It's pirates, so there's lots of biffing, cutlasses and rum. Coconuts get dropped on heads, the cooks fight with a ladle and a wooden spoon, and the baddie captain drinks so much he snores through a burglary. It's all cartoon fighting.

What to read next

If they fall for Beancat, she wakes up somewhere completely different in The Library Cat. She's on top of a bookcase, nose to nose with a very gloomy spider, and the town library is under threat.