by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 14, 2010

"Every day when I wake up, my cat Archie wakes up too."

The cat follows the girl around as she eats her breakfast, and then gets her hair braided by her mother. She thinks that cat must wonder where she goes all day, as it watches through the window while she steps onto a school bus. Both the illustrations and the text give a wonderful picture of their life together. But the book takes a magical twist towards the end, letting the girl see the world from the cat's perspective!

What makes this story work is its lifelike believability. There's rich detail in every illustration, like when the girl enters the school bus. The inside of the house is filled with lots of green plants - plus a rug, window shutters, and a floor where you can even see the grain of the wood. Through the many panes of its two windows, you can see more bushes and trees outside, and in the far background, a yellow schoolbus - with the figure of a little girl stepping inside.

Because the drawings are realistic and colorful, both the cat and the little girl have real personality. And the text gives them even more life, like when it describes the cat jumping into the girl's arms and purring as soon as she returns home from school. The girl and the cat adventure off into the woods together, and sit still to watch the wildlife. They hear birds singing, and watch squirrels chasing each other. And the girl has to stop Archie from chasing after a pheasant that walks by with her chicks!

The book is a beautifully-drawn story, and it looks like a special triumph for author-illustrator Lynne Cherry. She first began writing and illustrating her own picture books as a child, according to the book's jacket, which also includes an illustration that she drew when she was ten years old. It suggests one of the most fascinating things about this 1990 picture book, "Follow Me, Archie". That illustration showed a little girl sleeping in bed with her pet cat - the same thing Cherry ended up drawing as this book's first illustration, 28 years later!

Page after page, the girl and the cat explore nature - but Lynne Cherry saves up one more final surprise. Every night the cat jumps out the window, now leaving the little girl to wonder the same thing - where does he go? But through the magic of a children's picture book, the little girl eventually gets her answer. The cat looks at her "as if to say, 'Follow me!'"

And he leads her to a special hiding place that he shares - where in the night he's secretly been visiting all of his other cat friends.

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