About the Authors

Susan Haas is a Charlotte, NC-based medical writer, dog-lover, and painfully slow runner. She’s the #1 fan of her five adult kids and husband, Ken. Most days she would gladly trade the family cat for a Starbucks latte.

Lexi Haas is very much the spunky, sassy, super-hero obsessed teen in The Year of the Buttered Cat. She embraces her inner nerd, her love of a good romance story and her disability but if you stand too close to her wheelchair, she will pinch you.

About the Book

Thirteen years ago, when she was just a tiny baby, something terrible happened to Lexi Haas. Something criminal. It left her with an out-of-control body and without a voice. Now, as a precocious, superhero-obsessed teen, Lexi is counting down the final 24 hours to a risky brain surgery that might help her talk or—dare she dream it?—to walk and use her hands. As surgery grows closer, Lexi finds an urgent, relentless need to share the story of the year in her life she calls The Year of the Buttered Cat.

That year, on the verge of shutting out the rest of the world, Lexi began a gutsy and solitary quest to find her “missing” body.  After the family cat went missing, too, and a mysterious letter appeared, Lexi reluctantly enlisted two budding friends to aid her search. But when these friends also disappeared, Lexi had to learn new ways to reach out to the world to save her friendships and uncover the truth about what happened to her as a baby.

 The Year of the Buttered Cat is a middle grade (and up!) memoir based on the real-life story of Lexi Haas. In the spirit of Wonder by R.J. Palacio and Out of my Mind by Sharon M. Draper, The Year of the Buttered Cat offers empowering, powerful messages of friendship, family, loss, and the art of redefining ourselves.