Murder At the Cat Show [Paperback]

Marian Babson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Bantam Books (1990)
• ASIN: B0011N73GE
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bet you can't read just one, January 27, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Murder at the Cat Show (Mass Market Paperback)

If I had to pick a favorite from Marian Babson's "cat mysteries," this would be it! This is the first of her books that I read, and since then I've been a compulsive Babson fan. These are the most true-to-life, hilarious cats and cat owners (and cat haters) I've ever read about. I never tire of re-reading this book, the prequel, both sequels and every other Babson book I've been able to get.

2.0 out of 5 stars A frustrating, annoying book, January 29, 2012

By 

J. Martin (Upstate New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Murder at the Cat Show (Paperback)

There's something about the way this book is written that made me want to pull my hair out and run screaming off a cliff. If I hadn't gotten hooked enough to keep reading to find out who did it I would have thrown the /book/ off a cliff long before I finished it.

It is cloying and profoundly annoying in some way that I haven't been able to identify yet; but I do know two things: If a writer is going to use the word "ailurophobe" four times in a 182-page book, she should learn how to spell it; all four times, she spelled it "aureliophobe". Once could be an uncannily complex typo, but four times is just stupidity. (By the way, the book is not full of misspelled words: I'm pretty sure that's the only one, which strongly suggests that's how she and her editor (if she had one) thought it was spelled.)

Second, if a writer is going to criticize people who relate to their cats as if they were humans instead of cats (as she has Doug Perkins do, with regard to Marcus Opal), she should first make pretty sure she (through the same narrator) is not doing the same thing herself. The way Doug gives voice to Pandora's thoughts and motivations (and Precious's and Silver Fir's and all the other cats' he encounters too) sounds more like the way a human thinks and is motivated than any cat I ever knew. It gave me the creeps.

I am not, by the way, an ailurophobe myself, as at least one previous reviewer of this book is. I love cats, I don't want to imagine how dreary life would be without them, and I've had several dozen of my own during the past fifty years, including one right now who is the best of all.

But Babson (in this book at least - and I'll never read another one) makes loving cats seem creepy, by doing what she accuses Opal of doing: showing them through romantic, melodramatic, anthropomorphic eyes rather than as fully formed and wonderful creatures in their own right who are not in any way reflections or appendages of human beings.

I don't doubt that Babson herself (or whatever her real name is) loves and respects cats in real life; I just don't think she knows how to write about them. And I am certain she doesn't know how to spell ailurophobe. Spelling may not matter to most people, but it matters when you're a writer.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not to my taste., February 7, 2011

By 

Lily Courthope - See all my reviews

This review is from: Murder at the Cat Show (Paperback)

While the writing style is certainly enjoyable -- Babson does have a good sense of humor -- the failure to develop fully rounded human characters at the expense of more interesting cat characters (a species that holds no interest for me at all) left me unimpressed. Since I didn't care about the people, I didn't care whodunnit either.