THE ANTIQUE STORE CAT

Alice, introduced in The Third-Story Cat (1987), is wandering again. This time, she gets caught in the rain and takes refuge in an antique shop. When she leaps at the parrot perched on the shoulder of a woman trying to sell a little statue to the kindly proprietor, it looks like disaster but turns out to be a good deed: broken by Alice's pounce, the statue is revealed as a fake. There's nothing very original about the story, but it's smoothly told (children will especially enjoy the reiterated comment that ""no meant nothing to Alice""), while Baker's impressionistic watercolors continue to be beautifully observed. Quiet, but a sure bet for cat-lovers.