Cat xenofiction that isn't Warriors? Gasp!
Anyways, spoilers ahead.
Solo is a young cat who from a young age shows promise and a susceptibility to the supernatural. When his Quorum is threatened by humans seeking to destroy it, Solo must lead them away from home into the wilderness, where they hope to find a place they can settle away from people.
While I don't think this is an amazing book or anything, I genuinely enjoyed this book. I find it to be very likable and it had me invested from start to finish.
Solo I find a very likable protagonist to follow. He's not perfect, but you can also really see the leader in him start to emerge over the course of the story. I honestly found him to be a quite admirable character, who despite his young age and inexperience is willing to do whatever it takes to keep his Quorum safe. I also thought his supernatural powers, while kept rather downplayed, were still interesting and you really do see Solo emerge as not just a leader, but also a Speaker, across the story.
The side characters I liked also, such as Ponder, Ditto, Spanno and Kitty-Kitty. These were all quite charming. There's even a major villain who gets a pretty nice redemption arc and joins Solo as one of his main underlings. This author in general seems to be pretty good at writing likable and decently rounded characters.
The story has an interesting world set up and you really do feel like you're reading from a cat's POV (unlike Warriors where the cats feel like talking humans). The cats act rather catlike and their behavior was really kept into account. There are some liberties the author takes, but overall I liked how the world used real cat behavior to create this unique society for its animal characters.
There are some supernatural elements in this book, but like said before they're kept pretty downplayed and they mostly just boil down to Solo having visions (sometimes of deceased cats). There's no cats doing magic here, but there definitely is this feeling that there's something supernatural going on here, even if it's few and far between and rather vague.
The book thankfully also never goes into huge exposition dumps about its lore or characters or world-building or anything, which I can really appreciate. Some xenofictions, particularly the older ones such as Watership Down and Duncton Wood, can sometimes do these big dumps of stories or lore on the reader and that just never worked for me. I prefer my exposition subtly and delivered in small bits, and not just like I'm reading a story within a story.
The book does have some sexism against the prils (female cats) which worried me a bit at first, but thankfully it actually is addressed in the story and throughout the plot we slowly see the prils become more emancipated and active players and treated with more dignity by the males. So that was nice to see. Usually in (older) xenofiction when there's sexism present, very little is done to address it. But this story, while falling into some of the old tropes regarding this, does at least do something with it. Kitty-Kitty was also a very nice and rounded character among a cast of mostly dudes.
So yeah, overall a book I really liked! If you like Warriors, xenofiction and cats and are an older reader (I wouldn't recommend this to kids) I do recommend this one.
Rating: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment