Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town - Li Chen - ★★★★

AUTHOR & ILLUSTRATOR: Li Chen

SERIES: Detective Beans, #2

GENRE: Children's Graphic Novel

PUBLICATION DATE: September 9, 2025

RATING: 4 stars.

In a Nutshell: A children’s graphic novel about a young cat detective and his (mis)adventures in Cat Town. Anecdotal in style, with multiple adventures: some short, some long. Adorable illustrations. Silly and fun all the way! Recommended to the right age group: beginner independent readers.

Almost as impossible to resist a cat book titled “Detective Beans” as to resist cat toe beans, right? When I saw the title, I expected a fun-filled graphic novel full of confuddling cases and clever detective work. Well, I did get most of this. What I didn’t expect was for the lead character to be a cat of school-going age! 😹

This graphic novel is the second in the Detective Beans series. Sadly, my library doesn’t yet have a copy of the first book, so I had to jump directly into this. But as this is just a children’s book, there is no major hurdle in comprehension. It is quite easy to know the characters and their personalities from the little snippets we see.

The book has three main characters: young Beans, who tries to find time for his “career” as a detective after he is done with school and homework and chores; Biscuits, Beans’ BFF who keeps his ego in check with her grounded comments; and Beans’ Mom, who encourages and tolerates her son’s antics in equal measure. I love all three characters, but Biscuits, even in her relatively limited appearance, is perhaps my favourite.

Beans is quite an amusing character. There is no consistency to his knowledge; he knows some cool adult stuff, but he is also ignorant about some fairly common facts. This young fella has a passion for sleuthing, but let’s just say that his skill still needs some refinement. 😸 This odd combination results in some entertaining “cases”. Beans claims that most of his cases are resolved successfully. I shall leave it to you to analyse his actual success ratio on reading the graphic novel.

The book is more like an anthology containing thirty-three stories ranging from 1 page to 18 pages long. As such, the jump from one story to another is often too quick. This could feel a bit too disjointed for little ones, but the advantage is that they don’t need to read the whole book at a go. A few of the stories could have benefitted from a bit more padding-up.

Don’t assume that ‘thirty-three’ indicates thirty-three cases for Beans to solve. There are indeed some cases in this set, but most of the entries are more about getting to know Beans through his daily life. A couple of the stories are comics drawn by Beans, depicting himself as a world-famous super sleuth; these are really funny. Some “stories” are just humorous inserts by Beans in the form of newspaper articles about something mysterious happening in Cat Town.

The whole set is presented in the form of a video-recorded memoir being shot by Biscuits. We get a glimpse of the recording process as well, including the bloopers committed on camera by Beans, his ponderings over a few cases, and Biscuits questioning him on the veracity of some of his claims. This adds much humour of the book.

The writing is great for the target age of 8-10 years, though it might also work well for 6-7 year olds with adult guidance. The text contains a few misspellings and spoonerisms. The latter is hilarious; the former is on the lines of similar deliberate “typos” like the ones made in Dav Pilkey’s books. I am not a huge fan of misspellings in children’s fiction as children might assume those to be accurate spellings, but at times, it does add to the laughter index. Most of the jokes are apt for the right audience. A few inside jokes (the likes of “Et tu, Birdus?”) might go over kids’ heads as they won't have any context for these.

The illustrations are quite adorable. I did think a frog was a parrot (Whoopsie!), but the rest of the character sketches are spot on. There’s a good mix of colours, the emotions and facial expressions are outstanding, and the lettering is perfect with a clear and nicely-rounded sans serif typeface.

The book includes a couple of Activity puzzles at the end – a cool bonus.

Overall, this is an entertaining graphic story collection that ought to deliver well for the target audience of grades 2-5. It will be a great gift for comic lovers and little cat lovers who have just started independent reading.

My thanks to Andrews McMeel Publishing for providing the DRC of “Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town” via Edelweiss+. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.