The Night-Time Cat and the Plump Grey Mouse: A Trinity College Tale is an illustrated kids book, but it’s actually got a good bit of interest for grown-ups of certain interests. The story itself is basically that Pangur Ban the cat escapes from the book where she lives to chase a mouse who has done the same (escaped the book for nightly wandering/adventure. She keeps running into the local ghosts, both literary and historical, and asks everyone if they’ve seen her prey (hint: they either have not or don’t care). Basically, it’s a cozy ghost story about characters escaping their books, or book-ish ghosts hanging around. For, Pangur goes by Joseph LeFanu and Bram Stoker having a literary vampire-off (summoning their respective creations from their books to prove whose vampire is better). If that doesn’t quite make sense (as in, maybe you don’t’ know who LeFanu was), there’s an illustrated guide on the inner back covers as to who is who, and what their connection to Trinity College was. The art is fun and slightly spooky but not scary, and if you look closely, the mouse is somewhere in each spread doing it thing while avoiding being caught by the pursuing kitty.
It’s strongly suggested that the book where Pangur and the mouse live is the Book of Kells (probably the most famous thing Trinity College owns; it’s basically got its own library, separate from the other campus library facilities), and this plays a part in the end when a monk scribe tells Pangur he’s seen the mouse, and they go to the special book the monk made a long time ago. Really my only complaint is that, technically, Pangur Ban (the poem) is not in the Book of Kells; it’s in the Reichenau Primer, which lives in an abbey library in Austria.
This is one of those kids books that’s got pretty pictures, a cute story told in a kid-friendly way (namely, it uses a refrain-based pattern), and some literary and cultural history to go along with it. If you’re the kind of adult who like Where’s Waldo (or in this case, the mouse), literary allusions, and a story kind of like The Librarian or Night at the Museum, this might also be for you, not just the kid(s) in your life. Seriously, I’m actualyl debating whether or not I want to keep it, or pass it on to my 6-year old nephew (as was the original intention).