Customer Reviews

Murder at the Cat Show (Thorndike Press Large Print Paperback Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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 that 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 claims to be. 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.

But this book has more serious problems than misspelling a crucial word and cloying cat talk. It is badly written in general.

Another reviewer very perceptively said that this book fails "to develop fully rounded human characters at the expense of more interesting cat characters." In fact, even the cat characters are flat and uninteresting. Everything about this book is flat and uninteresting.

When I read (and I suspect this is true for most people), I automatically create mental pictures of what I'm reading as I go along. Whether what I see is what the writer saw or not, I see SOMETHING. I see characters, I see places, I see things happening. It's like making my own movie of what I'm reading. I do it automatically, without trying to at all, and I do it whenever I read anything.

But with this book, I never saw anything. I never saw Doug Perkins or anybody else. I never saw a single cat. I never saw any part of the exhibit hall or anything else. It is the first time ever in my life that I have read a whole book and never seen ANYTHING in it.

I don't know how Babson did it, but somehow she wrote a book full of nothing but words, blobs of ink on paper, without a single person, place or object portrayed anywhere in the words.

She created nothing. The pages might just as well have been filled with numbers as words. It is uncanny, and reading it is a singularly unpleasant experience.

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.

If you want to just kick back and enjoy a light funny murder mystery you can't go wrong with anything written by Marian Babson. This is an entertaing mystery that will keep you guessing. Lots of quirky oddball characters. Sure to please the cat lover in all of us.

If you dislike cats, I wouldn't recommend this mystery, because it's all about cats.

This book took me a little time to get into, but after the first 25 pages or so, I was hooked. My heart was won by Pandora, an 8-month old Siamese with a lot of personality but a neglectful owner. Pandora plays a major part of this mystery, as Doug Perkins, the central character (aside from Pandora), goes from being a person indifferent to cats to being a true cat-lover. Pandora wins his heart, just as she won mine.

The plot involves a cat show in London. Perkins is doing PR for this show (kind of an odd show, but I guess this is Britain, after all). One of the exhibits is a pair of tigers; another is a gold statue of a cat, which gets stolen. One of the characters is murdered. Are the two crimes connected?

But much of the book involves descriptions of a half-dozen show cats and their humans, and all the goings-on at this London event. This is a very British book in tone, and the pace is fairly leisurely up until the last 30 or so pages, when things really heat up.

THis is the first mystery I've read by this author, but I intend to read more -- many more.