"Once there was a cat named Fletcher who lived in the largest and tallest tree for miles around. He had run up it in a moment of thoughtless abandon, and ever since had been unable to get down again." So begins the small and square, nonsensical and endearing Fletcher and Zenobia by Victoria Chess and Edward Gorey, first published in 1967.
Up in the tree with Fletcher is a leather trunk containing a hat collection that the cat doesn't need. But one day, he finds a large papier-mâché egg in the trunk, and inside is Zenobia, an old-fashioned doll cast off by an unfeeling child named Mabel. Since there's no getting down from the tree, the cat and doll decide to have a party with lemon cake, peach ice cream and "what seemed like at least several hundred balloons, although really there were only twenty-seven." The extensive hat collection finally comes in handy. A guest making a "flumpety flumpety" sound shows up and reveals himself to be a moth. Lots of waltzing under the stars and eating of "frightfully rich" cake ensues, and the moth grows so large so fast that he is, in the end, able to fly them off the tree top: "And so Fletcher and Zenobia flew away to the great world--and who knew what special occasions?"
Chess's enchanting artwork is finely etched and saturated in jewel-like colors, each small square a perfect little painting framed by a creamy border. As in Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussy-cat, readers will want to follow these two wherever the scrumptiously implausible journey takes them. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness