THE STORY OF THE SEAGULL AND THE CAT WHO TAUGHT HER TO FLY.

THE STORY OF THE SEAGULL AND THE CAT WHO TAUGHT HER TO FLY by LUIS SEPULVEDA (Translated by MARGARET SAYERS PEDEN, with illustrations by SATOSHI KITAMURA).

ALMA BOOKS BLURB: Caught up in an oil spill, a dying seagull scrambles ashore to lay her final egg and lands on a balcony, where she meets Zorba, a big black cat from the port of Hamburg. The cat promises the seagull to look after the egg, not to eat the chick once it’s hatched and – most difficult of all – to teach the baby gull to fly. Will Zorba and his feline friends honour the promise and give Lucky, the adopted little seagull, the strength to discover her true nature? 

FIRST SENTENCE {One: The North Sea}: "School of herring port side!" the lookout gull announced, and the flock from the Red Sand Lighthouse received the news with shrieks of relief.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 34}: Einstein lived in a place rather difficult to describe, because at first view you might think it was a cluttered shop of curious odds and ends, a museum of exotic whatchamacallits, a storeroom of mechanical thingumajigs, the most chaotic library in the world, or the laboratory of some brainy inventor of screwball contraptions.

SOURCE: Read and reviewed on behalf of Alma Books.

MY THOUGHTS: A fairly small book that has a big heart. There are so many wonderful messages conveyed, not least of which is the environmental one, within this relatively short novel of 120 pages.

I loved the highly principled not to mentioned self-controlled Zorba - after all its not every cat who would agree not to eat a newly hatched chick. And as for his motley crew, wonderful. 

Translated from the Spanish and primarily marketed at those aged nine to eleven. As with many of the other little gems published by Alma Books this is one of those books suitable for both children and adults wishing to escape into the magical realm that is children's books. The only slight niggle I have is that the afore mentioned environmental theme is perhaps not as subtle as I might have expected and verged on being repetitive. Much more endearing to me was the message relating to families with a 'difference'.