A Wise & Wonderful Read

I hadn’t intended to read Paul Gallico’s achingly tender, wise  and lovingly written  THOMASINA — the Cat Who Thought She was God.
I had gone to the local library intending to get a Kenneth Fowler book for I was looking for a quick and easy read, even if it was a thriller full of excssive killings and cruel revenge.
My eye fell on the 50-year old Gallico book.  I vaguely remembered the author's name and the title, recalling that it had been a popular book.
My wife was recently given a kitten by our children and we have a granddaughter who sometimes comes to play with it, so I thought it might be a good book to have around.
I had forgotten that Gallico had written the wonderful and warm The Snow Goose, which I had been introduced to long ago when it was a Hallmark Masterpiece television drama.
I began reading THOMASINA and soon was charmed and caught up in this compassionate and witty tale which left me nodding in knowledgeable agreement with such lines as “in some ways girl children and cats are not unalike. There is some special mystery about little girls, an attitude of knowing secret things and a contemplative and not wholly complimentary quality about the way they look at you sometimes that is often as baffling and exasperating to their elders as we are.
“If you have ever lived with a girl child you will know that quiet, infuriating retirement into some private world of their own of which they ae capable, as well as that stubborn independence in the face of stupid or unreasonable demands...For you can no more force a cat or a girl child to do something they do not wish to than you can compel us to love you.”
In sum: THOMASINA is the cat’s meow.
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