Reviews of The Great Escape

The Great Escape, for nines and upwards, concerns Millie, who is bored and fed up with cleaning windows with her dad at a large laboratory. Suddenly Max, a talking cat with a sardonic sense of humour, comes bursting through the glass doors she is cleaning.

Having escaped with Millie's aid, he has to redeem his promise to his kidnapped feline chums inside to liberate them too - and guess who is going to have to help him?

The Haynes sense of humour shines through the story, so animal lovers won't find it harrowing, but will enjoy finding out exactly who would want to make cats talk, and why.

Newbury Evening News, October 2007.


This is a story crying out to be filmed! It is about a talking cat who, with his rescuer Millie, frees his fellow cat prisoners from an animal research laboratory where they have been experimented on to make the next big present for children at Christmas!You see what I mean?!

Millie, a bright computer literate girl, is on school holidays, helping her father who has been made redundant from his IT job and is cleaning windows to make a living. Millie unwittingly helps Max, a talking cat, escape from the laboratory, but he is desperate to free his friends, most of whom are cats from Belgium. Millie gets in touch by email with what she believes is the animal rights group protesting outside the laboratory...

The idea is ingenious and carried out well... Max, the cat is clever and cat-like and the three children are well rounded and credible, which makes the idea of a talking cat more believable than I thought it would be. The message about animal rights versus animal testing is subtly delivered. This would be great for bright compuer-liteate young people of 10 and up.

School Librarian, December 2007.


Computer buff, Millie, is having an unsatisfactory summer as helper to her father in his temporary job of window cleaner, which involves weekly sessions at the Haverham lab. Just as she is concluding that life could not be any more boring, a van draws up at the back doors she is cleaning. A man engages her in uneasy conversation while shifting some mysterious crates. Millie is sure she can hear meowing, and later her father admits that the lab is probably engaged in some animal testing. On their next visit, she unwittingly helps a cat to escape – a talking cat. It transpires that cats from Belgium, distant from the lab’s illegal trade, are being kidnapped and operated on so that they can talk, but who is behind this piece of animal cruelty? Millie’s search for answers leads her to friendship with a teenage animal rights protestor and his whiz kid 10-year-old brother, Ben. Just how the unlikely trio rescue Max’s fellow cats makes for a light, but very entertaining story.

Comedian and radio performer, Natalie Haynes brings a lovely dry wit to a subject presumably close to her heart. Max, in a subtly European-inflected English, has a keen eye for human absurdities and pretensions and is a past-master of sarcastic put-downs. But faced with Millie’s sleuthing abilities, Jake’s courage, and Ben’s precocious hacking skills, even he has to concede that perhaps there’s some point to at least the child of the human species. Technical wizardry, a humorous hint of cat romance, big-business greed and buffoonery are just some of the sparkling ingredients in this feline versions of 101 Dalmations for the 00s.

Books For Keeps, January 2008.