That Curious Thing

While looking for her cat Muffin, self-possessed 12-year-old Cleopatra Stein meets Jane Oakhurst—an ostensibly childless cat lady who turns out to be the leader of PURR (Peace Urgently Requires Reasonableness), a secret global society of talking cats who battle the evil KLAW (Cats Loving Awful Warfare). (“They put the K in just to be annoying,” complains one furry PURR member.) Cleo and Muffin enlist in a mission to stop KLAW from misusing an invention “that could solve the energy problems of the whole earth for the next hundred years”—KLAW intends to use it to send all dogs into space, where they will hold them for ransom. Since every world leader owns a dog (they’re considered “more patriotic” than cats) the stakes are sky-high. Eclectic characters, spot art in the creator’s signature smudgy style, plentiful cleverly imagined or screwball tangents and asides, and the revelation that cats or cat-human hybrids are behind every technological leap, save the wheel, make for an archly comical, occasionally woolly fantasy novel by Raschka (My Book and Me). Ages 8–up. (Sept.)