The Cat at the Wall
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A remarkable and thought-provoking new novel set on Israel’s West Bank, by the author of The Breadwinner.
On Israel’s West Bank, a cat sneaks into a small Palestinian house that has just been commandeered by two Israeli soldiers. The house seems empty, until the cat realizes that a little boy is hiding beneath the floorboards.
Should she help him?
After all, she’s just a cat.
Or is she?
It turns out that this particular cat is not used to thinking about anyone but herself. She was once a regular North American girl who only had to deal with normal middle-school problems — staying under the teachers’ radar, bullying her sister and the uncool kids at school, outsmarting her clueless parents.
But that was before she died and came back to life as a cat, in a place with a whole different set of rules for survival.
When the little boy is discovered, the soldiers don’t know what to do with him. Where are the child’s parents? Why has he been left alone in the house? It is not long before his teacher and classmates come looking for him, and the house is suddenly surrounded by Palestinian villagers throwing rocks, and the sound of Israeli tanks approaching.
Not my business, thinks the cat. And then she sees a photograph, and suddenly she understands what happened to the boy’s parents, and why they have not returned. And as the soldiers begin to panic, and disaster seems certain, she knows that it is up to her to diffuse the situation.
But what can a cat do? What can any one creature do?
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.3
Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The best thing about being a cat is that nothing is my fault," says 13-year-old Clare, who died in Bethlehem, Pa., and has been reincarnated as a cat in another Bethlehem the one in the West Bank. As a human girl, Clare taunted her sister, manipulated her parents, and butted heads with her homeroom teacher; these and other memories are triggered by Clare's current situation, as the narrative nimbly jumps between past and present. In Israel, Clare witnesses the horrors of life in a war zone on both sides of the "Big Wall." Her life mainly consists of foraging for food until two soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces one American, one Israeli, and each with his own motives for being in the army and beliefs about the conflict commandeer a Palestinian house to do surveillance on a neighboring building; Clare decides to help the traumatized boy hiding in the house. Ellis's (No Ordinary Day) premise is an unusual one, but with it she crafts a thought-provoking and sensitive story about the power of empathy and selflessness. Ages 9 12.
