I Was the Cat by Paul Tobin, Benjamin Dewey
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book reminded me of the best garfield book ever: Garfield: His 9 Lives, which was basically authorized garfield fanfic, taking the reader through his past incarnations, all with completely different styles of artwork, many of which terrified the crap out of me when i was just a little kid.
good lord. goosebumps, still.
this one is a little less jarring, since i didn’t have to watch the death of a beloved cartoon character again and again, but it still has its moments of subdued horror.
this is a book about a talking cat. but it doesn’t take place in a world full of talking animals—this is our world, and burma is a one-of-a-kind deal.
he is now on his 9th life, and he decides it’s time to write his memoirs. however, just because he can talk, it doesn’t follow that he can also write—he is stuck with these little cat paws with their little toe-beans and all.
so he hires a ghost-writer—allison breaking of the blog BREAKING NEWS (groan) to write it for him. he does not tell her she will be writing the memoirs of a cat before he imports her from america to london, but he does warn her over and over again that she may be alarmed by his appearance, to the paranoid consternation of her friend reggie, a london-born girl with whom allison is staying.
but once they meet, the cat’s kind of out of the bag (!!), and after some “should i or shouldn’t i??” allison decides to embark on the project.
she had been warned of the unusual nature of the situation, yes, but she had not been warned that burma was quite so eeeevil, having used pretty much each and every one of his former existences to try to take over the world. because he is a cat, and they appear lazy, but are secretly ambitious:
This is going to sound arrogant, and maybe it’s just because I’ve always been different, always an outsider, the only talking cat, but for my whole life, for all of my lives, I’ve always felt superior. And there’s no sense in being superior without exercising that superiority.
burma has been around for millennia. i’m not really sure how cat-lives work, but i guess when one of their lives is finished, they get to scoot forward in time to a different significant period and carry on from there. as such, burma has seen WWI, met audrey hepburn, and served napoleon, each time a different breed, but with the same basic goal.
he also got to be bayonetted, drowned, eaten by dogs, beheaded, etc.
so—some wins, some losses.
and if you have been paying attention, you have already come to the conclusion that no cat with such a history of world-domination attempts is gonna slack off in his last go-round. so, all the while he is dictating his life to allison, he is also mobilizing a cat-and-human army to try for the gold one last time. conspiracies, assassins, doubles and disguises—a whole criminal underworld at burma’s beck and call.
it’s a fun little book—the only part i hated was the james bond-interlude. a little cringe-y, and definitely not as interesting as his other lives.
but, like all books, this one came to an end. and like many comic books, it ends with what feels more like a pause than a coda. so, maybe there is more to come, or maybe this is just a standalone with a weakish ending.
but it’s about the machinations of a talking cat. worth a read, right?
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