Charles De Lint has been recommended to me for such a long time. And as both a cat and nature lover this one seemed like an obvious place to start.
This book gave me two surprises, the first being it was oddly sad/dark for a book which has the word "whimsical" in the blurb. What happens is essentially one of those careful-for-what-you-wish-for, where the consequences of it results in the protagonist becoming an orphan. The rest of the book is about fixing it. It has a happy ending, but I wasn't prepared for how sad that middle part would be.
The other surprise, is that it has a big focus on Native American folklore. Nothing in either the blurb or the cover hints at this, so it was quite a surprise. I quite enjoyed this element, but I'm unsure how I feel about the publishers choice in essentially hiding this.
My only real complaint however, is how dare Charles De Lint make a title like "the cats of tanglewood forest" just for there to be a rather huge lack of cats! Also, the sentence "I'm not a cat, I'm a girl" gets repeated a lot and it peeved me that not a single character responded with "well you're a girl cat now" as if cats didn't have genders .
It really felt like a fairy tale tho. Which I can only applaud.