A personal, vulnerable volume of poems about loving cats.
McCready celebrates her pet cats in this illustrated poetry collection.
To be a cat owner is to spend innumerable hours entranced by the things your cats do. The author, a prolific documenter of her cats both in photographs and in verse, knows this all too well. “I have a camera that’s inside my eye,” begins one poem. “My little babies are always posing for me. / Sometimes they run, and sometimes they play, / then my minds eye video stores it all away.” In these 24 poems, McCready praises her many cats, current and former, documenting the joys and trials of cat ownership. She composes odes to particular cats, like Devlin and Rhys, and writes from the perspective of others, like the “terrible and alone” Daisy. Her cats are of the sphynx breed, some short-haired and some hairless, and the poet relishes in the unusual aesthetic of their wrinkled skin and bat-like ears: “A thing that might seem odd and wrong, that looked as ancient as a crone, / someone once found beauty there, and now I’ll never be alone.” McCready grapples with the occasional heartbreak, like the strange illnesses cats sometimes get, or the knowledge that she will outlive them: “Eventually they always go / In the back of our mind we knew, we know. Love in a body will never stay, although we wish it was that way.” The rhyming verses are full of memorable figurative images, as here when the author describes the cats sleeping on her bed at night: “Tonight my bed’s like a sanded shore, / where naked sun worshipers have come to snore.” The poems are accompanied by photographs of the cats by the author and Bray and by McCready’s illustrations, most of them realistic though some fantastical (including, in one disturbing tableau, two cats spliced into Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, reaching toward one another with human hands). The book captures the strange worlds pet owners create for themselves and their animals, and while fellow cat owners may or may not enjoy these highly specific poems, they will undoubtedly recognize some of their own obsession.
A personal, vulnerable volume of poems about loving cats.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798991729024
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Aber Stoat Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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