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
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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