Scholastic Canada - Ghost Cats

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Arthur A. Levine Books
ISBN 0-590-37131-2
128 pages
Ages 8-12

by Susan Shreve

He wasn't sure if it was a ghost or the real thing. But there sat Parsimonious, licking his paws on the stoop of a neighbor's house as if he'd never gone missing. As if all the family's cats were alive and well, and paired off with one of the Hall kids. As if his siblings were still his best friends, inseparable. As if nothing had changed.

But everything has changed. Boston was supposed to mean permanence for the Halls, the final stop for a family that had moved every year to countries all over the globe. And permanence is supposed to mean comfort, stability. So why does it feel as if suddenly everything Peter has loved is spinning away from him? His sisters find other friends; his brother develops a learning disability. His mom goes back to school. Peter is the only one who seems to have time on his hands. Too much of it.

For the first time in his life, change is the enemy. And it has him surrounded. Then the ghost cats arrive...


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Excerpt from GHOST CATS
by Susan Shreve

May

Yesterday after school, I walked home in a terrible storm. I let myself in the front door of our town house in Boston, turned on the light in the hall because the rain had darkened the day to almost evening, and there under the round table where the mail is kept, was my ten year old cat, Rrrr. He was dead.

I could tell immediately. The way he lay stretched out, his head flung back, the way his legs had stiffened, his absolute stillness, his half-opened eyes.

I had seen dead before and more than once.

I walked upstairs, went into my room, closed the door, and sat on the bottom deck of my new double-decker bed. I probably sat there, straight up with my feet on the floor, for quite a long time, wondering if I too might die because my heart was beating so fast. I was hoping someone would come home so I didn't have to spend the afternoon sitting alone on my bed with Rrrr downstairs under the table. But no one did, and no one would until five o'clock when my mother finished at law school and picked up Susanna. Susanna had a play-date as usual, with one of her trillion new best friends in kindergarten, and I didn't know where Emily, my other sister, was going after school, of course, I never did. In the last month, she had started liking boys. My brother Tobias had stayed after school because he has to have tutoring for his learning disability, which is something he didn't have until we moved to Boston this year. That's the trouble with Boston. All kinds of unexpected things have happened since we arrived here.

Before we moved to Boston, we were always together, the four of us, a regular team of children — a "domestic army" my father likes to say.

From Ghost Cats. Copyright © 1999 by Susan Shreve.

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"This book is a good book. I love this book!!" Kyle B., Age 7, U.S.A., Rating: 9

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