THE ONLY TRUE BIOGRAPHY OF BEN FRANKLIN BY HIS CAT, MISSY HOOPER

In this children’s novel, Benjamin Franklin’s cat tells the real stories behind the man’s greatest accomplishments.

No one knows a man like his cat. That’s the premise behind this portrait of America’s most colorful Founding Father, as related by his black-and-white cat, Missy Hooper. “Dr. Franklin and I worked together for a great many years,” demures Missy in the book’s foreword. “I taught him many things he didn’t know. He taught me many things, some of which I didn’t know and some of which I forgot I knew. Together we changed the course of history.” Missy meets Ben when he is just a 23-year-old printer’s assistant. He’s never met a cat who could speak before, and she immediately becomes a source of inspiration for his signature aphorisms. With Missy’s help, Ben soon starts founding institutions—a library, a hospital, a fire department—and developing inventions. Missy even witnesses Ben discover electricity. But their greatest collaborations begin decades later (Missy’s breed of cat can live for nearly a century) when Ben takes up the cause of American liberty. In fact, to hear Missy tell it, if it wasn’t for her (and Ben), the United States of America never would have existed. Written in Missy’s voice, the prose is sassy and humorous, building up the cat at the expense of her owner: “Too many buttery sauces and too much caviar and goose liver paste. Both Ben and I had put on a lot of weight. I carried it well. With all my fur you could barely tell I’d put on any weight at all.” The enjoyable tale is accompanied by stylish, uncredited black-and-white illustrations as well as a glossary of words in Cattish (the language in which the book claims to have been originally written). The jokes largely fit in with the humor one associates with cat owners (for example, felines are adorable divas with an inflated sense of their own importance), but Greenburg manages to blend this perspective effectively with Franklin’s unusual life story. Young readers who come for the cat material will learn a lot about this famous figure, and if what Missy has to say about the Feline Historical Society is true, there may be more cat-authored biographies in the future.

A well-crafted, feline-centric Franklin tale for young readers.