Saphie The one-eyed cat

Gr 3--5--Saphie, the titular feline member of a home with four cats, rules the roost. An expert at getting her family to feed her, Saphie puts her powers of persuasion and mercurial temperaments on full display. Various attempts to control Saphie's weight do not work and readers will enjoy seeing how she gets around all of them. A particularly humorous scene is when the dad tries to get Saphie to walk on the treadmill. The other cats get their time as well with stories displaying their typical cat behavior, what toys they like, and relationships with other family members. The book is made up of many short comics about daily life with cats, however, two seem to depict a god-like being creating these cats from bread dough, with a prankster teenage Lucifer adding soda to the youngest cat creation, apparently to add flavor. With the rest of the stories being realistic, these chapters could be confusing. The color scheme is predominantly muted tones of brown and green with black outlines. The action is conveyed with lots of close-ups, sound effects, and cat vocalizations. The panels overlap, tip, and change point-of-view; the dialogue balloons are easy to read. VERDICT Give this to cat fans, especially the Pusheen crowd.--Elisabeth LeBris

The antics of a one-eyed cat and her siblings, adapted from a webcomic about the author's own pets. In a whimsical intro, a somewhat clumsy God bakes three felines. Orange tabby Simba is dispatched from heaven sans fuss. But brown Sahn is too hot to handle and plummets to Earth after he slips from God's hands. While making the third cat, Saphie, God drops the dough on the floor, so the gray-and-white kitty ends up missing an eye. "A little dust never harmed anybody," God says with a smile, and Saphie joins the other cats in a family of four humans. Loosely connected vignettes provide a wry cat's-eye view of everyday life as Saphie endures the indignity of being brushed, the injustice of being put on a diet, and the exasperation of being a big sibling when mischievous black-and-white kitten Sol arrives (after Lucifer crashes God's kitchen to add "flay-va"). Cat lovers will grin at the feline siblings' squabbles and sympathize with "human sister" Joho as she attempts to enlist the cats as exterminators, to humorous results. Each cat's realistically quirky personality is reflected in the onomatopoeia-adorned comic panels, from cool Simba's deadpan gaze to scaredy-cat Sahn's wide eyes. Refreshingly, Saphie's missing eye--given a more secular origin story in a nostalgic adoption flashback--is only part of her (literally and figuratively) well-rounded character. God and Lucifer are tan-skinned; Joho and her family present East Asian. Catnip for feline fans.(Graphic fiction. 8-12) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.