Thomasina The Cat Who Thought She Was a God

By the author of the classic The Snow Goose, a heartbreaking story about a young girl and her most unusual cat, who has magical powers that save her owner's life.

Seven-year-old Mary adores her ginger cat, Thomasina, and is crushed when Thomasina falls sick, and Mary’s father, a grim, inflexible man who is the town vet, decrees that the only thing to be done is to put Thomasina down. Mary refuses to speak to her father, and then she herself contracts a life-threatening disease. In the meantime, however, Thomasina has been rescued—by the mysterious Lori, the Red Witch of the glen. Thomasina is now Talitha, the descendant of an Egyptian goddess, and she is coming back to seek revenge!

Thomasina, like Jenny of The Abandoned, Paul Gallico’s other great feline heroine (Jenny is Thomasina’s great-aunt), tells her own story in her own way, witty, charming, divine, and sometimes as sharp as an unsheathed claw. Thomasina is a cat for the ages. Thomasina is a sheer delight.

Paul Gallico (1897-1976) was a popular and prolific sports columnist, screenwriter, and author of books for adults and children. He was born in New York City to an Italian immigrant musician father and a mother who had studied to be a singer, and paid his way through Columbia University by tutoring children and working as a longshoreman. He began his career at the New York Daily News, where he soon became famous for his adventures with star athletes of the day. In 1937 he published the essay "Farewell to Sport" and turned to fiction, publishing stories in publications like Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker. Among his forty-one books are the novella The Snow Goose (1941); Manxmouse (1968, often cited by J.K. Rowling as one of her favorite books); Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (1958) and its four sequels; and The Poseidon Adventure (1969), the basis for the hugely successful 1972 film. From 1950 until his death Gallico lived outside of the United States, mostly in England, Antibes, and Monaco. The New York Review Children's Collection publishes Gallico's The Abandoned.