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
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
