Margaret Greaves (1914–1995)

Cat’s Magic by Margaret Greaves

The gist of this story is that Louise Genevieve Higgs, an orphan, has to go to live with her aunt in the country. They don’t get along with each other very well, and Louise wishes she was anywhere but on her aunt’s dilapidated farm. (This is a pretty standard scenario for a children’s timeslip story). When Louise saves a kitten from being drowned, the Egyptian Cat Goddess, Bast, rewards her with the ability to travel anywhere she wants. Since she is so long-lived, however, Bast’s view of time is not quite the same as that of ordinary mortals, and Louise ends up not only in different places but also in different times.

This children’s novel is very well written and the story is quite engaging, despite the strange time travel mechanism. At first, I was afraid that Louise might simply go for many unrelated jaunts into different periods of history (which is what happens in Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander, which I found rather tedious), but I need not have worried. Happily, after the first two experimental jaunts, Louise remains for most of the rest of the story in a seaside town in the Victorian era, where she finds a position as a servant in a boarding house. There are dishonest dealings afoot in this rundown hotel, though, and it is up to Louise and her fellow servant, Flora, to find a way to put things right, which they eventually do by enlisting help from the twentieth century.

There are some slight logical inconsistencies in the story which I think only adults would be likely to spot (for instance, how a person from the nineteenth century could take a test and acquire a driving license in the twentieth century without any documents for personal identification). I also think that since the goddess rewarded Louise for saving a cat, it would have been appropriate if the principal mission had also been related to felines in some way. Nevertheless, even though the story turned out to be about finding ancestors and thwarting the schemes of pretty stereotypical Victorian villains, it was still an original and enjoyable tale which I think would be appreciated by readers belonging to the target age group.

This book was first published in 1980, and has been out of print for quite some years. There are, however, secondhand copies available from Amazon, and it can be borrowed in electronic form from Internet Archive/Open Library.
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I ordered this title sight unseen because I thought Greaves was the illustrator of The Mice of Nibbling Village, and wanted more such. Unwrapping this, I was initially disappointed because the cover does not correspond to the riches inside. This is a witty re-telling of Adam in the Garden of Eden, and Pauline Baynes's pictures are lush and absorbing. Her endpapers are exceptional, as her stylized but detailed trees are set against a black ground and colorful birds are scattered about. My only exception is a wish that the publisher had allowed that color saturation on all of the pages rather than breaking it with white space for the text. Black text against a daylight sky would have improved the look of the book.… (mehr)