Cats and magic are two topics that obviously interest Robert Westall, since they appear again and again in several of his books. In The Devil on the Road,a young man gets involved with a young girl who turns out to be the spirit of a seventeenth century witch. Not only does he fall in love with her, he becomes quite attached to her familiar spirit, a little cat named Newsy. The ghost of a young girl also plays an important part in The Promise, where the young hero promises his girl friend never to leave her. When the girl is killed in an accident, her ghost returns to demand that he fulfill his promise by following her into the grave. A more realistic cat is the heroine of Blitzcat, the story of a feline survivor of a German bombing attack during world War II. Traveling...