The Gilded Cat

Grade 4-7-- When 12-year-old Maggie Jones pays four bits for an odd little figurine at a neighbor's yard sale, she gets far more than she bargained for. It turns out to be the mummified remains of a kitten that had been the pet of Thutmose the Utmost, a boy pharoah whose reign was so tragically brief that it has been ignored by Egyptologists. Ignored or not, Thut's spirit--Maggie soon discovers--is very much alive and anxious to recover its property. Before you can say, ``The Mummy walks,'' Maggie is involved with Thut in solving an ancient mystery that still has the potential to destroy both her and her family. Despite some genuinely frightening moments, The Gilded Cat is not without its flaws. Its basic premise, for example, begs the question of how an American archaeologist could have taken the tomb of a pharoah--even one forgotten by history--out of Egypt in the first place. And even if readers ignore that improbability, they cannot ignore the fact that the book's denouement is also both predictable and--despite a careful buildup--almost perfunctory in its resolution. And yet . . . Dexter does demonstrate a real gift for mixing well-imagined elements of the supernatural with realistic settings and believable and sympathetic characters. Less critical readers will ignore the imperfections and enjoy an otherwise well-crafted and scary story. --Michael Cart, formerly at Beverly Hills Public Library
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A small, catlike figurine that Maggie picks up at a Boston yard sale turns out to be the mummy of a Pharaoh's prized pet--and the Pharaoh wants it back. Whether he appears as the ghost of a boy or as a small ka-bird with a human head, Thutmose the Utmost is more startling than scary--indeed, he's rather whiny, and has hung around for so many years because he's too cowardly to face the trials and gods of the Egyptian Underworld. The plot thickens when Maggie encounters Thutmose's uncle Seth, an evil magician who--not content with having killed his nephew originally--has pursued his spirit down the centuries to destroy it as well. Dexter's loosely constructed storyline is replete with contrivance and labored subplots, but also contains some wonderfully weird moments: Maggie and a friend board a bus to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, but instead it takes them to a decayed neighborhood that they come to realize is the Underworld; later, the climax opens with Maggie and her younger brother alone in a house suddenly awash with scorpions. An intriguing, if uneven, ghost story from the author of The Oracle Doll (1985). (Fiction. 11-14) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.