Vivid human and feline protagonists in an engaging juxtaposition of fantasy and often grim reality.
The lives of a teenager, a cat, and a disturbed killer fatefully intersect in this novel.
When 13-year-old Ava Reed’s best friends go away to summer camp, she finds solace in Minna, her new rescue cat. But Minna is mourning the unborn kittens she lost when she was spayed (or “janed,” as felines call it here), and she is desperate to find her son Shoo, who disappeared before she was trapped and taken to a shelter. Shoo isn’t the only missing cat in Ava’s New York City neighborhood. Over the course of the story, driven by a fantastical imagining of the real and spiritual lives of felines, Minna—and Ava—will discover the terrifying reason why. This unusual mix of reality, fantasy, and horror interweaves the growing pains of a young biracial girl (Ava’s divorced mother is Black; her absentee father is White) with Minna’s painful estrangement from her adult offspring, her desperate attempt to reunite with Shoo, and her fraught odyssey through the spiritual plane of feline existence known as the “Catalogue,” a vast tree of collective knowledge that “grew from the memories of Bastet, the First Cat.” This is not a children’s book despite its deceptively simple illustrations by cartoonist Bechdel, whose graphic memoir Fun Home (2006) inspired the 2015 Tony Award–winning musical. Perspectives shift among Minna, Shoo, Ava, and the twisted scientist attempting to ascend to the Catalogue after experiencing it in a vision. Cats call cars “Borrowed Bodies.” Their mothers name them with “a look in the eye, a thrum in the throat, and a droplet of code from a scent gland,” and feline souls reside in their hyoid “purring-bones” that fly to join Bastet after death. Ava’s daily life encompasses her encounters with casual racism, a Black Lives Matter protest, and disabled and gay characters (her mother’s bisexuality is suggested). Sensitively observed, often gritty and dark, with a poignant conclusion that lingers, this book is Avery’s final work. (The author died in 2019.) Avery’s previous novels, The Teahouse Fire (2006) and The Last Nude (2012), earned the American Library Association Stonewall Awards for excellence in LGBTQ+ English-language literature.
Vivid human and feline protagonists in an engaging juxtaposition of fantasy and often grim reality.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-57-450256-3
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
