THE STRANGE GARDEN

The DeLeeuw sisters, who have for a long time, been writing successfully for young readers, seem to be somewhat out of their element in this animal fantasy of a dispossessed cat named Mandy. We first encounter Mandy, in her strange garden, as she befriends a variety of squirrels, robins, and rabbits. An extraordinarily discriminating cat, she apparently is able to maintain these friendships while contemplating a dinner of live mouse or fish. Then, just as we have accepted Mandy as a kind of feline Robinhood, superbly independent and unhampered by gross animal instincts, there is a switch and we meet Mandy, the ""nobody's girl"" cat, who decides, as she succumbs to a bowl of cream, that it is, after all, very nice to belong to a family. Alas, poor Mandy, too human to be a cat, and too catlike to be human, she is one of those uncomfortable misfits of fiction, who are doomed to wander forlornly through the limbo of pathetic fallacies.