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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Your reader will be several steps ahead of him here, which is the fun of it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Atticus is put on dried food, which he thinks tastes like mummified rabbit poo. His ear droops. It droops a lot in this book.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11765,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":6849,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Atticus Claw Breaks the Law","lr_seo_hook":"A reformed cat burglar gives the kittens a talk, and it goes badly wrong."},"book_tag":[1050],"age_group":[19],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[454],"class_list":["post-6852","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-action-books","age_group-books-for-7-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-jennifer-gray"],"yoast_title":"Atticus Claw Lends a Paw by Jennifer Gray | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A reformed cat burglar gives the kittens a talk, and it goes badly wrong. For ages 7+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n