The Wild Road

The Wild Road by Gabriel King
Del Rey - March 1, 1999 (first published 1997)
460 pages

Secure in a world of privilege and comfort, the kitten Tag is happy as a pampered house pet--until the dreams come. Dreams that pour into his safe, snug world from the wise old cat Majicou: hazy images of travel among the magical highways of the animals, of a mission, and of a terrible responsibility that will fall on young Tag. Armed with the cryptic message that he must bring the King and Queen of cats to Tintagel before the spring equinox, Tag ventures outside. Meanwhile, an evil human known only as the Alchemist doggedly hunts the queen for his own ghastly ends. And if the Alchemist captures her, the world will never be safe again...

First off, I have a deep and unrelenting hatred for the typographic choices of this novel. The copy I got from the library was only 380 pages, and so I thought that it was going to be a quick read. This was made even more likely by the table of contents and other opening stuff being in 13-point Goudy Old Style, which is large with great spaces in-between. Then I got to the actual story, which was in 11-point Times New Roman and I think had spacing of 0.8. I would rather this book be 700 pages and a readable font.

The "spring equinox" part is, safe to say, ridiculous. While that might have been a good starting point for the book, so much is mentioned of the cats walking around for months doing nothing that the whole idea of the impending equinox is thrown out the window.

And then there's the whole language issue. While the cats love the minced oath "stuff", e.g. "stuff off!", they will use pretty much other word as it was intended, some of them frequently. At first I was taken aback by the use of the kitten Tag's use of the word "damn", as it didn't really seem like something a cat of his age would say. Then I got to all the "stuff off" and thought that it was just a personality thing and they'd be unlikely to use any real obscenity. Then the characters Sealink and Mousebreath, who would swear like sailors at every given opportunity, started saying "stuff", and at that point I was just plain confused.

That's not to say that I hated the book. I would pick it up day in and day out. However, the urgency was more to finish, and not to see what happened, if that makes sense. It wasn't like, say, Tailchaser's Song or Watership Down, where I desperately cared about everyone and needed to make sure that they were okay. I wanted to finish, that was all.

Grade: B