Tiptop Cat

Every cat owner knows how much felines love to perch, and Mader’s self-possessed, black-and-white hero has found the best perch of all: the chimney tops of his owner’s Paris apartment building, where he enjoys killer views of the Eiffel Tower. Showing the same attention to feline behavior demonstrated in his debut, Lost Cat, Mader often uses multiple frames and panels to track the cat’s wanderings, mingling precision and sly humor in his pastel images. A wrong step in pursuit of a pigeon almost puts an end to it all: in a sequence of funny-scary images, the cat tumbles down story by story, past a pianist, a woman doing a yoga headstand, and a transfixed beagle before falling through an awning and into the arms of a well-positioned greengrocer. “Nothing was broken except... his spirit,” writes Mader, but with some unintended help from a like-minded connoisseur of vistas, the cat is soon “on top of the world again.” With knowing, understated narration, this is storytelling at its most elegant. Ages 4–8. Agent: Brianne Johnson, Writers House. (Nov.)