4 ideas
Tibbe, a timid reporter at a small-town paper, is about to be fired because he writes gentle pieces about cats instead of hard news. Minoes, a cat turned into a young woman who still hisses, purrs and climbs, becomes his secretary and connects him to a network of neighbourhood cats who pass along the town's gossip. The cats' reports turn him into the best-informed journalist in town.
Cats go everywhere, on rooftops, in kitchens and back gardens, and nobody bothers to behave well in front of them. That makes them witnesses to what people really do, not what they perform in public. The best intelligence about a community comes from those whose presence nobody takes seriously.
The cats know that a prominent factory owner and public benefactor is secretly cruel, but a cat's word, or a cat-woman's, carries no weight against his reputation. Whether evidence gets believed depends on the social standing of the witness, not on its accuracy.
Minoes lives caught between her feline instincts and her new human life, and she faces pressure to go back to being a cat. Her choice to stay human, while keeping her cat habits, treats belonging as something she chooses through attachment and loyalty. It is not fixed by what she was born as.