You don’t have to be born into a family
to call it your own
Leonard has never had a name. Or a body. Or a best friend. But he is excited to try being a human.
On their three-hundredth birthday, every alien from Leonard’s home galaxy gets to spend a month in the body of an Earth creature. Leonard was supposed to become a forest ranger in Yellowstone National Park – but there was a mix-up. And now he’s stuck as a stray cat.
Luckily for Leonard, he meets a young human called Olive- and together they set out on a journey to find home.
Genre: Middle Grade Fiction/Fiction
Age appropriate: 9-12 years
Number of Pages: 256 pages
Date of Publication: 03/09/2020
Author/Illustrator/Publisher:
The author of this lovely book is Carlie Sorosiak who is a creative writing professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. She also wrote ‘I Cosmo’, ‘Wild Blue Wonder’ and ‘If Birds Fly Back’. The cover art work was designed by Ben Mantle.
Nosy Crow Ltd is the publisher of this book.
Rating: 5/5
Review:
A well written book aimed at middle grade readers about an alien who came to earth to experience life as a human but became distracted and ended up in a body of a cat. After this he met Olive, an 11-year-old girl who desired to find a friend and who named him Leonard. Both started a special friendship and soon they start living out new adventures. Leonard’s trip to earth was about discovery and about experiencing another way of life.
The story is written through Leonard’s eyes and it gives us such a great perspective on life as a cat but also as an alien who wants to learn about and try to do human stuff. Carlie was able to write a story that was sweet, quirky, heart lighted, heart-warming and where friendship and family are everything.
The pace of the story is perfect as you are always learning something new about the characters and their life’s. Each character brings something special to the story and their interactions between them is very well written.
Each chapter is more exciting that the last one and the whole book is full of charm, humour and different emotions. Reading about how Leonard felt as a cat, how odd, broken and alone he was at first was very moving. The last chapter brought me to tears and was a great end to a very memorable story. This is a book that I couldn’t put down and without really noticing I became fully engrossed in the story.
At first I wasn’t so sure about reading a story where aliens come to earth as this can be a complicated subject but I gave it a chance and I am so happy that I came across this lovely book.
Young readers will be simply delighted by this story as the book is full of adventures and lessons that children can relate to.
Just to mention that now I really want to get a cat.
Availability: ‘My life as a cat’ is available at Nosy Crow website here. And in all good bookshops.
Shelf Life 
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