When an aging witch begins to run out of spells, she needs a congenial place to hang up her broomstick. So when Arabelle notices an opening in the witches’ retirement home, she consults her cat Izzy and moves in. The two are welcomed into the senescent coven and fit in nicely until Izzy begins to get underfoot. The witches then want to evict him, and Arabelle, who adores her pet, resigns herself to leaving. But Izzy is not so easily defeated. Patching together scraps of discarded spells, he works some gravity-defying magic that allows him to hang from the ceilings, out of harm’s way, yet still within earshot of the gossiping witches.

This is the third picture book by Lesynski, an Ontario-based author, illustrator, and graphic designer. It’s a light romp through the land of conflict resolution, with the exuberant silliness of the words and pictures at least as important as the values implied by the plot. Loyalty, compromise, and resourcefulness are there for the observing, but the reader’s attention will likely be swept along with the energy of the rhyming couplets and unvarying dactylic rhythm. The cluttered, fanciful watercolour illustrations suit the text and include some nice touches of humour: for instance, the witches use a dragon teapot, and the cat wears a suit of armour made from colanders and cooking pots. However, the illustrations are more diverting than esthetically pleasing: the witches are pop-eyed and bulbous-faced and have warts and whiskers, and the cat looks as if it’s been splattered by a rainbow paint bomb. In short, there is a lot of goofy ugliness about the figures in these pictures. On the whole, Catmagic has a spirit of fun about it – in a loud and extroverted sort of way. Though there aren’t many subtleties in it to be pored over by a solitary reader, it’s a good candidate for reading aloud to large groups of children.