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The Cats of Roxville Station
by Jean Craighead George

It's almost impossible for me to resist anything that has to do with cats. So when I spotted this book at the local Friends of the Library book store, I decided to fork over a couple of bucks and see if I could enjoy a little feline entertainment, in literary form.

Turns out I probably should have stuck to LOL cats on the web.

The Cats of Roxville Station is ostensibly a children's book. It was published by a well-known publisher of children's books (Dutton). It has illustrations like a kid's book. It is short and tells a fictional story. All the earmarks of kid lit are there.

But here's the thing: the author is not really interested in telling a story so much as teaching a lesson about what life is like for feral cats.

Uh-oh. Whenever a kid's book is out to teach you lessons, you should probably run the other way.

It's been a truism throughout my many years of reading children's lit: books that are written to be educational--presumably as well as entertaining--are invariably only marginally educational, and hardly entertaining at all.

So it is with Roxville. The story follows the growth and travails of Rachet, a cat who is abandoned by her family and has to make her way among the hierarchy of feral cats who hang around a village train station and its surrounding neighborhood. In parallel, the text also follows a young boy (also an orphan--see what the author did there?) named Mike as he observes the cats of Roxville, roots for Rachet, and generally conspires in various ways to get his guardian to allow him to adopt his hoped-for cat.

Sounds interesting, right? Well, maybe. In reality, the story reads slow, has little that's particularly compelling to hold the interest, and ultimately just lacks a certain amount of literary punch.

The cats are characters in this story, but not as literary creatures. These are not anthropomorphic, talking animals. The cats are just cats, which means they only contribute to the story through actions, not thoughts, feelings, or any abstract expression thereof. That may be a big reason why this reader, at least, found it very hard to connect to these felines, despite being possessed of a passion for these favorite animals. Feline inscrutability may be fascinating in real life, in your living room--but it comes across as static and uninteresting on the written page.

It's possible that this negative vibe about The Cats of Roxville Station may be the product of expectations, but the author is not off the hook for not meeting the reader's anticipation. Things happen to Mike, and the cats--Rachet in particular, of course--but they rarely rise above the level of ordinary stuff. It is perhaps telling that I am writing this review several months after I finished reading the book. Nothing about the experience was all that compelling. I'm mostly producing this write-up just to get the book off my desk.

Overall, it's not a bad book--it's just not a particularly interesting book. And that's a hard idea to wrap one's mind around if you're as crazy about cats as I am. (And no, this feeling is not the product of my being an adult reading a child's book; even a kid's book, if well-written, should produce a certain amount of fascination and delight in an older reader.) I wouldn't necessarily recommend throwing The Cats of Roxville Station out with the litter, but I don't recommend rushing out to the library to pick up a copy of it, either.

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Call of the Cats
by Andrew Bloomfield

There are two possible takeaways from reading Andrew Bloomfield's Call of the Cats: What I learned about Life and Love from a Feral Colony.

One is that Bloomfield is an uncommonly dedicated animal lover, one who devoted a huge part of his life to taking care of a group of backyard cats for little more than the intangible rewards of good deeds done (and maybe, perhaps, a decent writing contract).

The other potential takeaway is that Bloomfield confirms many observers' perceptions of cat people as weird, off-center, and perhaps more than a little crazy.

Andrew Bloomfield's Call of the Cats

The latter notion comes through to the reader less by way of the author's interaction with the cats in his neighborhood's large feral colony and more through what Bloomfield reveals about himself in the process of telling his story. In various diversions, Bloomfield discusses his time in Nepal, his on-again, off-again work as an astrologer, his spectacularly unsuccessful career as a day trader, his time as a dealer in rare Asian artworks...in short, Bloomfield relates the story of a peripatetic working life in which he apparently did everything except hold a normal job. The implication--no normal job because he's no normal person--seems clear, and certainly reinforces the notion that someone who would dedicate himself so vigorously to taking care of a group of cats--who often feel substantially less care for him--is probably a bit of a misfit, at least as far as the general rules of society go.

Nothing particularly revealing there. Those of us who love cats, in general, would have no problem with characterizing ourselves as misfits. In this world, dog owners are clearly deemed to be the normal people; they fit in, and one could even say they come across as quite satisfied with themselves. No such comfort exists for cat lovers, particularly those who really love cats. Bloomfield, apparently, qualifies on all counts there.

If you can get past the author's eccentricity, you do get an interesting and informative portrait of just how difficult it can be to handle--literally and figuratively--a colony of feral cats. The stories range from heartening--tales of this or that cat's recovery from a seemingly fatal illness--to heartbreaking--the devastation wreaked upon the colony, and particularly its kitten population, by the local predator population (coyotes, raccoons, opossums). It ain't easy living out there in the spaces in between, and it can be a harrowing experience if you're trying to help the cats who have settled into those spaces. That message shines through in Bloomfield's writing, at least as strongly as the characterization of the author himself does.

If there's any problem with Call of the Cats, it's mostly from a sense that the tale told in the book is comprised of many disjointed segments; a sense of flowing narrative rarely comes out of these pages. (Bloomfield's personal diversions do as much harm to that sense of flow as they do to his chance of being perceived as normal.) Also, the cast of feline characters grows too large at certain points for the casual, not-entirely-attentive reader to keep straight. The reader winds up feeling muddled in more than one stretch of the book's length.

But it's hard for a cat lover to make too negative an assessment of a book like this, and for an author who clearly exposes a deep and abiding love for the subjects of his literary inspiration. Those of us who deem ourselves to be true feline friends will find more than enough pleasure from Call of the Cats. And even the dog people among us, if they're feeling charitable towards their eccentric neighbors--and can get past feeling so satisfied with themselves--might get a bit of joy out of this very cat-centric book, too. It's certainly worth picking it up and giving it a try.