“Cat Among the Pigeons”

Author: Julia Golding

"Cat Among the Pigeons" is book two of the Cat Royal series. I read and reviewed the first book, "The Diamond of Drury Lane" and I thought it was pretty good. (You can find it in my library of reviews) Although, "The Diamond of Drury Lane" didn't turn out to be one of my personal favorites, a lot of you guys really enjoyed it. "Cat Among the Pigeons" to my surprise was really good, even though I'm a fantasy action freak. The setting for these particular books is in the streets of London, and the main character, Cat is strong willed with a tongue to match. 

An African boy, Pedro Hawkins, has been staying at the Royal Theater in London performing in their large production plays. Cat stays behind the scenes and runs errands for the theater. Both Pedro and Cat have become really good close friends, and enjoy each other's company. One day Pedro's former master,  Mr. Kingston Hawkins,  shows up at the Royal Theater declaring that Pedro is a runaway slave and rightfully belongs to him. In a desperate attempt to protect Pedro from his abusive slave master, Cat helps him hide. Things start to get ugly when Mr. Kingston pans to make a scene during the play Pedro stars in, and Cat becomes wanted for "attacking" Mr. Hawkins after he had harassed her.  Cat flees the theater and ends up with some old friends who decide to help her. Their solution: to disguise her as a boy and enroll her in a boys school where no one would look to find her. Meanwhile, Pedro also takes off to hide from Mr. Kingston, but now he's missing and no one seems to know where he is. 

Not much of a mystery is involved, but the story is very interesting with plenty of characters from different societies, both poor and rich. Most of the characters were already pretty well developed from the last book, so it made it easier to focus on the plot. A lot of the story though is filled with political talk, making slavery against the law, what the rights of slaves should be and such. Written in first person, I felt that Julia Golding's writing was done very well. One thing these books do differently from others is they don't have chapters, you have acts and scenes. So, you navigate through the books like: Act 1; scene 3. So, that's different. All in all it was interesting enough for me to want to finish it.