I felt more compassion for the secondary character in this book than the main character. At first, I thought perhaps Kit was imaginary but then as the story progressed, I wanted to know more about Kit’s situation as it seemed she had no one, except the rock.

Caleb’s best friend is now into sports, leaving all the things they used to do together behind. Caleb feels like he lives in the shadow of his perfect, older brother Patrick.  To escape his brother, Caleb heads off into the woods by their house.  Spying some crawfish, Caleb stops to try to catch them.  He thought she was an angel the way the sun surrounded her face, but it was only Kit, the new girl who was now telling Caleb how to fish.

This was where she hung out at.  This area inside the woods. She invited him to return the next day and he definitely would!  Finally, he had someone to hang out with and a special place that no one knew about. 

I liked reading about the friendship these two started and how things progressed. They both had issues that they were trying to hide/avoid.  Kit was doing a great job of hiding hers and then, there was Caleb, who couldn’t get away from his.  Caleb had a father who was unpredictable, a mother who was over-protective, and a brother who thought he could do no wrong.

Caleb starts to question Kit about her carefree life and her responses were short and matter-of-fact. I felt there was some kind of jealousy at times, as Caleb watched Kit.  I wanted and needed to know about Kit, as there’s something going on there.  Yet, Kit remains silent, not questioning Caleb about his life.  Caleb wonders if she notices that he’s different than other kids.

It’s a great book that covers a lot of different topics. Caleb has cystic fibrosis and Kit is being abused and neglected but these issues don’t take center stage.  It’s quite an adventure.

This series stars a bunch of stray cats who are usually depicted as tough human thugs and gang members. Ryuusei is a newcomer in Nekonaki, the territory ruled by Taiga and his gang. He doesn't always think before getting into fights, but he's tough and has the scars to prove it. Taiga and the others think he might be looking to steal some territory, but in reality the only thing he's interested in is finding a mysterious calico tom with a scarred eye. There's a chance that the cat Ryuusei wants to find is the new leader of the Goblin Cat Tails, but in order to meet him he'll first have to fight his way through a bunch of cats trying to create a cat utopia.

The main reason I got this was because of the cats. And also, the "cats depicted as people" aspect reminded me a little of Hatoful Boyfriend (although I suppose that was "birds briefly depicted as people"). Based on what I've seen of the cat politics around my apartment building, depicting cats as thugs duking it out for pieces of territory seemed like something that would work well.

The art was decent: nice clean lines, cats that were usually drawn well (the legs were occasionally weird), and easy-to-follow action. I liked the way Okada worked aspects of each cats' fur pattern into their clothing design. For example, Taiga, an orange tabby, wore a jacket with tabby stripes on it. Design-wise, Madara was my favorite, both in his human and cat versions. As a cat, he was a tortoiseshell (which would probably be hell to draw consistently if Madara became a regular character). In his human form, his tortoiseshell pattern became a coat with a camo pattern.

The humor was so-so. A few crass moments, like when Ryuusei tried to hit on Mii, or when a panel focused on Ryuusei's jiggling feline balls (so many cat testicles in this). There was also the bit with Ryuusei and the box. Honestly, it's amazing he's survived this long.

The whole "cats depicted as people" thing seemed a little inconsistent. It wasn't quite that these were cats sometimes shown as people but still 100% cats - Okada occasionally drew them in poses that weren't natural for cats but were natural for their human depictions. But behavior-wise, they also weren't just cats with people's minds. It was a bit weird.

Unfortunately, the characters and story didn't capture my attention at all. The characters did a lot of shouting and posturing but didn't otherwise stand out much. The one moment Ryuusei really stood out, for example, was when he demonstrated a willingness to show his belly to humans in order to charm them into giving him food. Otherwise, though, he was mostly Main Tough Guy Who Shouts a Lot and Is Occasionally Silly. Taiga was Leader Tough Guy Who Shouts a Lot. Then there was Kinbi and Ginbi, aka Tough Villain Guys With Dreadlocks Who Shout a Lot. And Mii was The Girl. I assume this world has more than one female cat in it, but you wouldn't know it from what you saw in this volume. I liked that it was noted that the volume's male calico and tortoiseshell were both rare, but it would have been nice to see more female characters.

It was a little confusing, but it sounded like the male calico Ryuusei was looking for was maybe someone he looked up to at some point. Other than that, I have no idea why finding this particular cat was so important to him. I also don't know that I care enough to buy any more of this, although there's a possibility I might check out a library copy of the next volume one day.

Extras:

A page of translator's notes, which for some reason is included just before the final chapter in the volume, and a couple full-color illustrations.

A missed opportunity: the volume was peppered with cat-related terms that readers might not necessarily know, like clowder and molly, so a page devoted to those might have been a good idea.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

(I'm guessing on the page numbers since there aren't any. I wish more manga publishers included page numbers.)

I bought this a while back. The basic premise: stray cats depicted as human tough guys (along with occasional ladies they drool over).

There's a pair of cats in my area - not ferals since they're friendly with people, but I don't think either one of them has a permanent home. Anyway, one of them is a black cat that has considered the area around my apartment building to be his territory for a couple years (assuming it's been the same cat - I have a picture of the moment I discovered that the one black cat I thought I'd been feeding was actually two cats). The other is a grey tabby who's been trying to claim this area for his own. He doesn't really fight much, but he can spend as much as an hour inches away from the black cat, screaming in his face. It's super annoying. If they were people, the grey cat would be a skinny wannabe tough guy who shouts and curses more than he fights, while the black cat would be a slightly scarred big guy with a mildly annoyed expression on his face, trying to ignore the young idiot screaming at him.

I borrowed this first-in-a-series from my e-library on an impulse, because it was heavily recommended on a book forum I follow. I enjoyed it, with reservations. A little to my surprise, it was published in 1994, but I suppose it's receiving a second burst of popularity because it was made into a 2018 TV series (which I have not seen).

Set in New York in 1896 (although introduced by a brief flash-forward to Theodore Roosevelt's funeral in 1919), this is the story of a serial murderer whose victims, juvenile transgender or male cross-dressing prostitutes, are particularly unmentionable in polite society. Roosevelt is New York City police commissioner (a fact about him I did not know), and is in the process of sweeping corruption out of the department, which is earning him and anyone associated with him a few enemies. He is a secondary but important character in this narrative, and the fact that there is no historical account of his having been involved or in charge of such a case is easily enough explained by society's squeamishness; that same explanation is given for the fact that our narrator, John Moore, though a reporter for the New York Times, never attempts to report on the highly shocking events in the novel.

Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is the Alienist of the title, the principal investigator, and the mouthpiece for what I imagine is a somewhat more sophisticated view of serial killer profiling than was actually available in the 1890s. Two other investigators (Jewish brothers, who supply some of the comedic byplay to offset the gruesome details of the murders) are given the responsibility of introducing fingerprint evidence and also travelling to remote places to gather evidence and provide a bit of historical background on the American Indians of the time (and the generation before).

This is not a "puzzle" mystery - we discover the murderer pretty much in lockstep with Kreizler, Moore, and their somewhat anachronistic but nonetheless welcome female detective-by-courtesy, Sara Howard, whose largest contribution to the profiling solution is to bring a woman's perspective (rather oversimplified) that women can also be abusers, and that such abuse is not necessarily physical.

Not sure what real-life modern-day profilers would think of Carr's explication of the killer's psyche or his fictional characters' subsequent ability to track him down starting with archival resources (pleased to see a plug for the profession, though!) It was convincing enough for my fiction-reading purposes, and seemed consonant with what I have learned through other (equally unreliable) sources such as the TV show "Criminal Minds". It was the perhaps over-enthusiastic dips into psychiatry, along with the very enthusiastic depictions of New York social history, that made me wonder whether Carr was casting all his bread upon the waters at once; I do enjoy good historical research in any kind of novel, but there was a great deal of explaining and describing here that, it seemed to me, wasn't all entirely focused on the telling of the story at hand, even if you concede that a mystery novelist has to create red herrings for his readers.

I could see the overarching backstory for principal characters being set up: Sara Howard is perched ambiguously in a non-romantic but potentially romantic situation for both Kreizler - who devastatingly loses a romantic interest in the course of this novel - and Moore - who, we are given to understand, has suffered a similar devastating loss just before the events. Unfortunately I made the mistake of reading online reviews for subsequent volumes in the series, and the consensus (if such a thing exists) was that the quality drops off. So though I did enjoy this one, I may not be in a hurry to revisit the series.

the pact

Favorite: Sadie