Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place is mesmerizing and mysterious. But there's no mystery as to why it's mesmerizing--simply take a look at the opening paragraph:

"There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake. One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall. This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do. The dead souls no longer wore gowns. They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living."

Three adolescent friends on an aimless walk. The horrors of the post 9/11 world. The ineffable world of the dead leaching through to the living. In five short sentences Davis sets the stage for a remarkable and unpredictable tale. And that's what keeps you reading this stunning novel--the mystery of what's going to happen next. In Varennes, a town near the Canadian border, ordinary life goes on--Helen Zeebrugge copes with the various indignities of old age, ex-hippie Andrea Murdock researches the past, Buddy the dog does his doggy doings, Gigi the cat works on fully experiencing every one of her nine lives, and 12-year-old Mees tries to understand the strange gift she's been given. But Varennes is a "thin place," a shimmering, permeable division between the real and the inchoate, between the living and the dead, and strange things happen almost as a matter of routine. Davis uses a variety of points-of-view to tell her story, including those of both two and four-legged animals, but to give a plot summary would be unfair to readers--suffice it to say that you've never read anything like this before.

In literary criticism circles, you often hear the term "metafiction," which is defined in the Encarta Dictionary as "fiction writing that deals, often playfully and parodically, with the nature of fiction, the techniques and conventions used in it, and the role of the author." (One example might be Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.) When I read Mélanie Watt's Chester, I figured that I had come across perhaps the world's very first meta-picture book. The book opens with Watt explaining that she's trying to write and illustrate a book about a mouse, a book that will begin "Once upon a time there was a mouse. He lived in a house in country." But her cat Chester (a.k.a. the self-centered furball, according to Watt) won't let her get on with her story--he thinks that it's his book and that he's in charge of creating it. With red marker in hand (or paw), Chester goes about editing Mélanie's (cat and author are, of course, on a first name basis) manuscript, with hilarious results. Just when the reader thinks that Watt has gotten the last word, or at least the last picture, of Chester in a pink tutu - could there be a more biting insult to any self-respecting cat? (Especially one who believes that his name stands for:
Charming
Handsome
Envy of Mouse
Smart
Talented
Envy of Mélanie
Really handsome)

Chester comes up with his own revenge. I can't imagine there's a four to seven year old out there who won't love this collaboration between author and subject, and amused adult readers will want to ask themselves just which of the two is the author, and which the subject of this laugh-aloud book.