A quirky and at times humerus read for the serious cat enthusiast.
Autobiographical story of a woman who finds magic in her inner voice and hope from her relationships with cats.
Given the whimsical title, the reader might anticipate that Duncan’s debut novel was a children's book, or an imaginative fairy tale. However, the novel opens with Duncan’s disclosure of the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse she sustained from her adopted father. Duncan’s breezy mention of her tumultuous childhood and the abuse her parents also both experienced as children is unsettling. Duncan’s father moved the family from California to Ireland, to free his daughters from the influences of American 1960s drug culture. At school, Duncan’s emotional pain was further compounded by bullying from peers. Without the ability to physically escape the circumstances of her own life, young Duncan retreats into her own imagination. Duncan’s internal life intensifies when she begins hearing voices, guiding and instructing her actions. Eventually she begins acting out the voices’ instructions. Rather than exploring why Duncan is hearing voices, Duncan’s grandmother tells her she has “the gift." Luckily the voices advise Duncan to join the school band, where she is welcomed by her peers. One day walking home from band practice, Duncan finds a seemingly neglected kitten. Duncan takes him home to join the family's six other cats. Unfortunately the kitten disappears into the night. However, Duncan quickly finds another neglected cat to direct her affections towards. Duncan is able to bond with her tyrannical father over their mutual adoration of cats. A long succession of cats provide Duncan with the affection and validation that her interpersonal relationships lack. In turn, Duncan sees it as her duty to care for all cats that come into her life. Each chapter, named in honor of a particular cat, reveals how Duncan’s relationships with cats complements her human relationships. Changes occur in Duncan’s family relationships, romantic relationships, and career. However, Duncan’s positive relationship with cats is a constant. Overall the writing is clear and sophisticated. However, an overabundance of cat stories overshadow Duncan’s sometimes insightful reflection on the complexity of human relationships.
A quirky and at times humerus read for the serious cat enthusiast.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490324395
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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