The Nine Lives of Furry Purry Beancat 3 – The Library Cat

Philip Ardagh's The Nine Lives of Furry Purry Beancat 3 - The Library Cat is a very silly story for 8 year olds about a cat who wakes up as the star of a town library.

What happens

That's her whole trick. When Beancat falls asleep she sometimes wakes up in a different one of her nine lives. She never remembers the last one, so she has to bluff her way through (which she does with great confidence).

This time she opens her eyes on top of a very tall bookcase, face to face with a spider. His name is Gregory and he is the gloomiest creature you'll ever meet. His wife Daphne is much bossier. Who knew spiders could be married?

The spiders need help. Reenie the cleaner is getting a can of bug spray, and Beancat has promised to make it vanish. Her plan involves a sliding cupboard door, a lot of head-butting and a pretend beanstalk in the staffroom.

Then comes the bigger problem. The mayor wants to close Gothport Library and swap it for a leisure centre with a swimming pool and a "self-service library corner". Everyone who loves the place is furious. So is Beancat.

And there are lots of people to love it. Joan secretly circles page 35 in every book she's read. Mr Pasternak is writing letters to the mayor and the newspapers. Yusuf is new in the country and missing his own cat back home. Timmy can't hear, and he turns out to be one of the rare children who can talk to cats inside their heads.

The narrator talks straight to your reader the whole way through. There's a list of "ten" smells that turns out to have nine on it, and a warning that Beancat is completely wrong about her singing voice. She thinks it's beautiful. Everyone else wants to throw a boot at it!

It's very much a cat's view of people too. Dave the library assistant doesn't like cats, so of course she goes straight over and rubs against his trousers. That's just what cats do.

Under the jokes it's a warm little story about why a library matters to the people who use it. If your reader has a favourite library of their own, they'll probably be on Beancat's side from the first page.

What to read next

For more of the world through a cat's eyes, try Beverly Cleary's Socks next. It starts with a kitten in a box outside a supermarket, waiting for someone to buy him, and it's all told from where he's standing.