And many of the pictures have little labels, some relevant to the plot, some apropos of nothing much, such as the one pointing out “a mouse called Robert that Mr. But the book is so much more than its story, because there is more pictured than is told-lavishly detailed drawings (black and white, with bits of red) everywhere, some of which take up both pages, with maps, and three-dimensional cutaways, and an odd sock collection and, of course, lots of pictures of Ottoline and Mr. That’s the bare bones of the plot frankly, the mystery didn’t intrigue me all that much. The bear in the laundry room is interesting, but the mysterious lost lap dogs and jewel thefts in her neighbor hood offer more scope for an intelligent young girl and her troll companion, who set off into the strange city to crack the case…. Munroe, her Norwegian bog troll friend and chaperone, and a host of service personnel who visit at regular intervals, and she passes the time working on her own collections, writing in her notebook of observations and clever plans, and splashing in puddles. Ottoline is the young daughter of eccentric collectors, who travel the world looking for such wonders as four spouted teapots. Ottoline and the Yellow Cat offers a similarly wonderful reading/looking experience, but with a very different type of heroine.

I remember as a child how I pored over the illustrations of the Eloise books-there is so much to see in them, and they are so much more than the words but so part of the story. Ottoline and the Yellow Cat, by Chris Riddell (Harper Collins, 2008, 171 pages but a lot of them are pictures).

Ottoline and yellow cat