Pomona: Stories of the Cat Witch

Name: Pomona: Stories of the Cat Witch
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

by author-illustrator Tor Freeman

Interest age: 5 to 11
Reading age: 7+

Published by Guppy Books, 2026

Chapter books
Graphic novels

About this book

Pomona the Cat Witch lives in a cosy cottage in the woods near her friends and family. She enjoys her peace and quiet but often finds herself having to solve one problem or another to help her pals. In the six individual stories in this book, we follow the patient Pomona as she bakes a cake for Elfis’ birthday, learns to empathise after a spring clean, teaches a friend the importance of apologies, struggles to share a hammock designed for one, finds new friends for her pet caterpillar, and sorts out a nighttime hullabaloo so she can finally get some sleep!

Tor Freeman’s distinctive illustrative style is the star of this book, and the characters and settings she conjures have so much charm and deadpan humour about them. The format is recognisable as a graphic novel, but each of the chapters contains a distinct short story so it feels more like a collection of comic strips, making it super accessible. Each standalone tale shares a gentle and open-ended message about friendship, almost like mini fables, and they allow space for children to interpret and discuss the characters’ actions. Readers will enjoy deciding whether Ratso deserved to be cursed with a head Gremlin for being rude to the monster in the bog, for example!

With short chapters, quirky humour, superb illustrations and plenty of off-the-wall characters, this is a great option for readers of mixed primary age looking for a cosy read.

About the author

I was born in London, but a South African mother meant frequent trips there when I was little, and memories of holidays with my grandparents next to the sea are some of my most powerful and influential. Leaving secondary school, I knew I wanted to study art, but hadn't really registered that illustration might be a degree all by itself. Finding that it was, I went to Kingston, and meeting a class of twenty other people interested in the same things as me was sort of a revelation - here were more people who'd drawn fairies in their teens, liked to talk about types of pencil and thought Maurice Sendak was wonderful.