Candlewick Press - April 8, 2008
256 pages
Alone and lost, a young cat named Mati is struggling to be accepted by a colony of street cats in the bustling marketplace of Cressida Lock. What Mati doesn't know is that he is the last of a vital, age-old breed and that a mysterious feline assassin named Mithos is close on his trail. With his enemy nearing, can Mati learn to harness his ancient powers --- before a deadly feline force destroys both him and his newfound friends and takes the spirit of every cat on earth?
One of the things that I absolutely adore about this book is the design. Mati is the last of a cat dynasty that comes from the Middle East, and both the main font (Weiss) and the chapter heading font give you that Arabic feel. The cover (though very low-resolution in this view) is amazingly detailed, giving you images of nearly every cat that's important to the story.
As for the story itself, it's better than most, though nothing Tailchaser. Iserles says that she got the idea from flipping through a book of cat breeds and thinking about two rivaling cat dynasties. The idea is excellent, but the execution is merely good.
When Mati first washes up on Cressida Lock, there are three cats that meet him right away: Binjax, Ria, and Domino. Binjax and Domino are mighty important to the story, but Ria just sort of disappears by part 2. Another character, a Siamese named Fink, exists only to hate Mati for a couple of chapters. I don't know what got left of the cutting-room floor, but these characters are half-baked.
The novel takes an entirely different tone halfway through. In the first half, Mati is struggling for acceptance with the Cressida Lock cats, but in the second half the assassin Mithos finds him and begins chasing him. The story is instantly much darker and quite a bit better, at least in my opinion. If there had been more in that tone and less in the previous one, I would have liked The Tygrine Cat more.
Still, it's not a bad book. In fact, it's a pretty good one. There were some genuinely suspenseful parts to it, and the primary character Jess had a rather interesting story to her where you weren't sure which way you wanted it to work out.
It was a pretty good book, but not extraordinary.
Grade: B+
No comments:
Post a Comment