It speaks to the loneliness, the piteous abuse and abandonment of the forgotten, and the sweetness of home, love, and family. But Peter has a secret, he is really a human boy who forgot his road drill and after being hit by a coal lorry wakes up in the animal underground of London, as a cat.

The poignancy of all three of these stories hits the same achy spot in my heart, but I had no idea until I reread it, that for ten-year-old-me, Jennie had been the foundation, the model, the prototype, even the archetype for this kind of heartbreaking, bittersweet story.Fortunately, he meets Jennie, a cat who had been abandoned by her family when they moved away, who educates him in the wiles of the feline world.

If you love books featuring cats or animal characters, or even if you love books featuring beautiful friendships, I will highly recommend 'Jennie'. Seeing a little kitten across a busy main road, Peter follows his tender instincts and runs, without doing his Green Cross, across the road. The story is by turns funny, sad, poignant, and riveting, as you follow them on their adventures and wonder if Peter will ever make it back home. One day, when out with Nanny, Peter sees a kitten across the road and he steps out in front of a coal lorry without looking. As a cat he meets with an angry tom who beats him to near death then he is rescued and nursed back to health by Jennie, another cat.In Franz Kafka’s ‘ Metamorphosis‘, a man gets up in the morning and discovers that he has been transformed into a giant bug. The ending was by far the most excruciating pain I've ever been in, it was utterly sad and I cannot find a book which can make me weep so much as this one has. I first read Paul Gallico’s delightful (and sobbingly heart-aching) book about a little boy who finds himself changed into a cat, when I was probably at target age 8-11, I think. Gallico, a life long animal, and particularly cat-animal lover, absolutely takes the reader inside cat-dom.

There are a lot of cute moments in the book, but the unsatisfactory ending and the fact that Peter seems way too old to be an eight year old is kinda not it for me. Fortunately, he gets rescued by the eponymous Jennie, a sweet-faced, sweet-natured, intelligent and rather plain fellow stray cat. Peter must learn the intricacies of being able to wash himself, the difference between the game of catching your breakfast mouse and killing a deadly rat, cat courtesy, the rules of cat conflict, how to open dustbins – and much more.Jennie" is of its era - the then-recent memory of World War II affects both setting and sentiment (Gallico was a war reporter from 1943-1946), and a few antique notions of masculine and feminine roles surface briefly - but the dated elements are unobtrusive and do not mar the work. In that novel, a young boy named Peter, much neglected by his busy parents, darts away from nanny in front of a carriage and is run over. Apparently, according to cat law, a female cat must go with a male cat once he has claimed ownership of her. I ADORE them, but have never been owned by them because I rather have to go the route of rescue cats, and few Meezers would find their way to ‘a pile of kittens dumped in a dustbin’ type stories. He awakens as a white kitten, immediately to be tossed out of his London townhouse and onto the cruel streets of London.