The day Joshua's mother left, she didn't say goodbye... not to him, anyway.

Now Joshua waits in a dusty repair shop that smells of cigarettes and broken things, rides home with a father whose best conversations end in "Damn," and navigates a world that keeps making decisions without him. He is twelve and mostly invisible. Until the night his dad swerves to miss a cat - and doesn't.

That one small, shaking creature, wrapped in a TV-repair blanket in the back of a pickup truck, changes everything.

There are woods behind the road. Inside those woods, there is a colony. And somehow, impossibly, the colony is waiting for Joshua.

The Boy Who Went to Live with the Cats is a story not only about the quiet grief of kids whose lives tilt sideways without warning, whose mothers vanish, whose fathers can only say I had no idea, whose teachers ask the wrong questions with the right eyes, but about all those who search to fit in. It's about the strange mercy of wild things, the way belonging can find you in the middle of the woods at night with nothing but firefly eyes to guide you.

Written with warmth, dry wit, and an unhurried tenderness, Amy R. Andersen gives us a boy who never quite fits, and a world of cats, caretakers, and unexpected strangers who show him that some colonies are chosen, not born.

For the ones who feel between worlds. For the ones still looking.

"Caretakers aren't always who or what we expect them to be."