You might be able to guess what drew me to this book. That picture of a cat on the front cover by none other than Dave McKean. There is a sequel too so it fits into this month’s continuing series theme. It’s about cats and it has a legendary illustrator – I’m in.
Varjak Paw is a Mesopotamian Blue kitten living in a big house on a hill with his family. However, his eyes are not the blue that marks his breed, so he is an outcast. His brothers bully him, and his parents ignore him. Only his grandfather, Elder Paw, is an ally. When their mistress dies and a mysterious stranger comes into the house with two dangerous and strange large black cats, Varjak is sent on a quest to find a dog to help rid the house of the strangers.
On the streets Varjak meets a selection of friendly and unfriendly cats and learns of the vanishings. Cats are disappearing all over the city. Varjak doesn’t know what a dog is even. He’s never hunted because of his sheltered upbringing behind the high walls of the house on the hill. He has no idea how to fight. How can he survive long enough to bring help for his family.
This is basically the Karate Kit. A bullied kitten finds itself on the streets and has to learn to fight. Luckily, he’s the great, great, many times grandkit of a fabled feline martial artist who visits him in his dreams and trains him. Even more luckily, his long dead, dream visiting ancestor trains him in exactly the skill he’s going to need for his challenge the next day every time.
It’s intrinsically silly, but it is a children’s book so that’s to be expected. The illustrations by McKean are to the usual high standard, and the greyscale pictures under the text in the dream sequences work much better than they should.
It’s all very simplistic and ties together too neatly at the end, but again, that’s par for the course with young fiction. Whether the cats behave convincingly as cats is up for debate in some places too. It all looks great, and, if you can allow for the demographic it’s aimed at, it’s actually pretty entertaining.
There is a plot line left open for the sequel (which I bought as part of a bundle with this book) and I can find no reason not to read it at some point in the near future.
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