Matt Haig’s To Be a Cat is a story for 8 year olds that starts with a narrator telling you, straight out, that cats are magic.<\/p>\n
He gives you the list of their powers. Understanding a thousand animal languages, including goldfish. Fence balancing. Sensing a dog coming through their whiskers. Napping on top of a telly with the news blaring.<\/p>\n
Then he reaches number seven and prints it as a row of asterisks, because he says you aren’t ready. What he will tell you is that the people who find out about number seven never look at a cat the same way again, and that one of those poor souls is a boy called Barney Willow.<\/p>\n
Barney is about to turn twelve and things are not going well. His ears stick out. A boy called Gavin Needle pulls his chair away as he sits down on it. The head teacher, Miss Whipmire, has decided she hates him more than she hates all the other children, which is saying something, because she once told an assembly that she thinks of the pupils as weeds.<\/p>\n
And his dad has been gone for two hundred and eleven days. Barney counts.<\/p>\n
So when he walks past a warm window with an old one-eyed cat dozing in it, he has the thought anybody might have. No school. No Gavin Needle. No being woken up before seven. Wouldn’t that be easier?<\/p>\n
The narrator is the best company in it. He butts in, apologises for butting in, promises not to do it again and then does it on the next page. Your reader will hear him like somebody sitting on the end of the bed.<\/p>\n
Barney’s birthday at school is laid out as a timetable, hour by hour, and it’s funny and a bit bleak at the same time. Maths. (As in, maths.) A deputy head breaking his own record for the most boring assembly ever given, this time about moss.<\/p>\n
Two things to flag. Barney’s parents are divorced and his dad’s disappearance is unexplained. He dreams about him, and on his birthday he goes through the post hoping for the handwriting, and there’s nothing. There’s also steady, grinding bullying, from a classmate and from an adult who ought to know better. If your child is in the middle of something like that right now, this could sit very close to home.<\/p>\n
For another Matt Haig story with a narrator who will not leave you alone, A Boy Called Christmas is in the library. It opens by warning you that if you think some things are impossible you should put the book down at once.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Matt Haig’s To Be a Cat is a story for 8 year olds that starts with a narrator telling you, straight out, that cats are magic. He gives you the list of their powers. Understanding a thousand animal languages, including goldfish. Fence balancing. Sensing a dog coming through their whiskers. Napping on top of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10620,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":6642,"lr_next_read_anchor":"A Boy Called Christmas","lr_seo_hook":"A boy with a missing dad, a monstrous head teacher and one wish."},"book_tag":[18],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[696],"class_list":["post-9589","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-animal-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-matt-haig"],"yoast_title":"To Be a Cat by Matt Haig | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A boy with a missing dad, a monstrous head teacher and one wish. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n