A sweet but uneven animal tale that aims to touch cat lovers’ hearts.
Sorhage’sdebut children’s picture book showcases the love between a girl and her unusual cat.
When the little girl first sees Mew-Mew, the cat is wearing a full cowgirl outfit and riding a cute brown-and-white horse at a ranch. The girl immediately falls in love and decides to bring Mew-Mew home with her. But this is no ordinary kitty: When she arrives at the girl’shome, she’s wearing a flowing purple skirt, cowgirl boots and a lavender blouse and carrying a purple backpack. The little girl imagines that her kitty speaks with a cowboy accent, using words like “[h]owdy” and “honky-tonk” as she does such things as lasso a lizard and play the electric guitar. The book’s personification of Mew-Mew is charming, but there’s minimal storyline, conflict or character development. Instead, it’s simply a series of moments in which Mew-Mew acts almost like a person. The little girl repeatedly talks about how much she treasures and loves Mew-Mew while watching her play on the computer, chase birds and dance, among other things. There are some delightfully humorous moments, such as when the little girl pinches her nose shut to block the stench of cat food or when Mew-Mew trusses up the lizard during a calf-roping competition. The illustrations are vibrant, with cheerful, bright colors that showcase the happy kitty and her adventures, although they sometimes lack detail and uniqueness. The old-school computer font gives the book a robotic feel, which seems at odds with the warmth and love of the story, and the simplistic presentation—alternating pages of text and illustrations—can sometimes feel repetitive. The text is also awkward to read aloud, as its periodic attempts at rhyme often feel forced. Punctuation and capitalization are also inconsistent, as when the girl makes up nicknames such as “Scouting kitty” and “Yeehaw Kitty.”
A sweet but uneven animal tale that aims to touch cat lovers’ hearts.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482713527
Page Count: 36
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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