By SF Said
A pedigree house cat who has never been outside must go down into the city, learn a secret martial art from his ancestor, and find out what is making cats disappear.
Varjak is a Mesopotamian Blue, a pure-bred cat who has spent his whole life indoors on a hill with his snobbish family, never once setting a paw outside. Then their old owner dies, and a Gentleman arrives with two identical black cats who never blink, and it becomes clear the family is in danger. Varjak's grandfather tells him he must go outside and find a dog, then teaches him that their ancestor Jalal knew the Way, a martial art for cats with skills like Slow Time and Shadow-Walking. Varjak jumps the wall into a city he doesn't understand, and has to learn to hunt, fight, and trust street cats while cats all over town keep vanishing. Jalal teaches him the Way in dreams, one skill at a time, and Varjak needs every one of them before the end. Dave McKean's dark, scratchy drawings run all through it.
This is the one for the cat-obsessed child who has started wanting a real story, and it takes cats absolutely seriously. Varjak isn't a cat in a waistcoat being cute; he's a cat, and the book is fascinated by how a cat moves, hunts, lands, and fights. The Way is the hook, a genuine martial art with named skills that arrive one per dream, so it reads like a training story, and children who love that structure devour it. The chapters are short, McKean's illustrations are on nearly every other spread and are as much of the pull as the words, so it goes down easier than 250 pages sounds. It's also properly written, with a real menace at its center that never gets explained down to nothing. A child who finishes it has The Outlaw Varjak Paw waiting.