The Station Cat by Stephen Hogtun

 

The Station Cat: A story of kindness and hope

"This train is not for you, and you have no ticket, you will have to save to come aboard."

A small skinny cat arrives at the old train station. People waiting for trains do not notice her.

"The colour drained from this place a long time ago."

You will have to save lives and save she does. This young half-starved cat connects with various people at the train station as each face a life crisis. 

"Crowds of people went about their sorrow without noticing her at all."

"If they had only looked closer they would have seen ... Eyes of radiant, jade green staring back."

There are wonderful words used in this book. Here are the colours: ginger, cinnamon, lilac, fawn, amber, carmine and violet. Other rich words: sombre, vapour, spectrum of colours, wistful, and vivid.

Share sentences like this with your older students:

"She paced softly upon graceful, pink paw pads ... "

"Waxed wooden herringbone floors reflecting the light blue sky which chorused the light footsteps that now skipped along it."

Publisher blurb: A lonely little kitten wanders into a dull, gray station, full of dull, gray people. Her colorful fur and bright green eyes bring warmth and life to this weary place, and soon people begin to notice the kitten. As she learns about the different travelers and their struggles from loss and loneliness, the little kitten wants to help fill their world with hope and color, too.

Adult readers will probably see deeper themes in this book (you can see these in the labels I assigned this post) as we watch each person engulfed by the despair of their life circumstances but I think readers aged 8+ will simply appreciate that a small act of kindness can mean so much to each of us.

The narrative itself is grave, detailed and evocative, matching the mood created by the colours and is set out as unrhyming verse so that the line breaks emphasise particular words and images. The movements and expressions of the cat are beautifully observed and the depiction of different passengers invites readers to imagine the stories of their lives and what has brought them to the colourless state at the start of the book. Just Imagine

This is a sophisticated presentation of an important message of the value of community and reaching out to others. ... The story stays with you long after you close the pages. More About Books

Every now and then when I go into the city, I decide I just HAVE to buy myself a treat - which for me is a Picture Book. It can take me a long time to decide what to buy because I am fussy, I want to spend my money wisely and I have three main criteria:

• The book has to touch my soul.
• The illustrations have to be exceptional
• If possible the book should be fairly new (this is not essential)

The Station Cat meet two of my three criteria. And I should add I prefer to buy picture books that cost less than AUS$30 although this criteria now needs revising because so many absolutely beautiful and truly special picture books are now closer to AUS45. The Station Cat was published by DK in London and it only cost AU$19.98.

Stephen Hogtun is an author/illustrator who lives on the west coast of sunny Norway in an old house overlooking a lovely fjord. His picture books cover serious topics in a very gentle, child-friendly way and feature visually stunning illustrations.

Here are some other books by Stephen Hogtun - I am curious about his work and how it came to be published in the UK and in English.

Good Dog by Dan Gemeinhart

You. Me. Together. Always.

... one thing wouldn't budge: the hard tug of his love for that boy. That love was the biggest truth he could ever imagine.

His heart glowed to a gold more glorious than any Forever. It shone brighter than all the blue skies and green fields and sunny days of anywhere and everywhere put together.

A few years ago I read another Dan Gemeinhart book - The Honest Truth - it captivated me. Last month I spied this book by Dan at a library book fair and the Teacher-Librarian kindly gave me this copy. Good Dog is a 'harder' book than The Honest Truth. Harder in the sense of emotional distress. The lines between good and evil are powerfully drawn. The scenes between the hell hounds and our two dog heroes Brodie and Tuck are harrowing. This is not a book for the faint-hearted.

Brodie has died. As the story opens he is in the afterlife but this is a place of transition. Brodie cannot move on because he has unfinished business back with his boy. He is allowed to go back to the land of the living but there are conditions. He will be invisible to humans and his time will be short.

"You're not going back as you were. You're going back as you are. A spirit. Nothing more. You're going back to a living world ... but you're going back dead. ... Your spirit will still have life for a while, down there,' the angel said. 'You'll even be able to see the glow of it. But with each moment in that world, it will fade. When your glow is gone, Brodie, you'll be stuck. You'll be lost. Forever."

"Every time you really touch the world, every time you make yourself real enough to do something - like jump on a truck - it costs you a little bit of your soul. Even walking down this sidewalk right now, all this touching of the world ... it's taking a little of our souls, just a drop at a time."

Brodie listens to these warnings but he knows he simply has no choice. His boy needs him. Snatches of his former life and especially his final moments with Aiden play out in his mind in fragmented flashbacks. For the reader, these are like pieces of an unfolding puzzle. I enjoy storytelling like this where the reader has to put in some work to understand what has happened in the past.  The reader also has to trust the author will keep you safe over the course of this dangerous journey.

All of your senses will be on high alert when you read Good Dog. Here is an example - the hell hound bites into Brodie:

"Darkly's teeth sank into his shoulder. No. His teeth sank into ... him. It was like nothing he'd ever felt. His teeth sank deep, and a high, ripping whimper was torn from Brodie's throat. But it didn't feel like pain, this bite. It felt far worse than pain."

I'd like to talk about motivations at this point. Brodie needs to help his boy and this is easy to understand but what of Tuck? He is a loyal companion to Brodie but he also has unfinished business from his former life. Tuck is such a great dog. I wanted to reach out and hug him. He is full of life and bounce but it is the cat Patsy who is the most complex character and I found myself constantly questioning her true motives for helping Brodie.

"Why are you even here, Patsy? Really. If you don't wanna help, if you think we're too dumb and this whole thing is stupid, then why are you hanging around?' 'I told you, sausage-for-brains, I was bored.' 'No way,' Brodie snapped. 'You wouldn't come all this way and go through all this stuff just 'cause you were bored. There's gotta be another reason. Tell us. What is it?"

I would recommend Good Dog for a very mature senior Primary student. I would follow Good Dog with The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett and Dog by Andy Mulligan.  For a slightly younger audience take a look at One dog and his boy by Eva Ibbotson which has the same emotional arc. Here is a video where you can see Dan talking about his book. Click on the reviews below for more plot details.


Action-packed, highly suspenseful, and deeply moving. Perfect. Kirkus

Brodie senses before he thinks; his narrative flows in visceral waves of experience. These sensory pleasures are no match for the emotional sturdiness of Brodie’s good heart.  BookPage