February 4, 2013
Prudence the cat is the dominant of three narrators in this jumbled tale about the ways a cat handles it's a change of ownership. Prudence is trying to get comfortable in a new home with former owner Sarah's daughter, Laura, and her husband, Josh. Typical Prudence wisdom goes something like this: "Humans need holidays and calendars to tell them things cats already knowâlike when summer ends." Sarah and Laura, on the other hand, have a tale to tell, about living in poverty and losing belongings and the people they have each loved along the way. Sarah, a DJ in the 1970s who bought a record store on a whim, had Laura at 19 and raised her in a rent-controlled apartment on New York's Lower East Side. Cooper (Homer's Odyssey) folds into her narrative a controversial 1998 demolition of a New York City tenement that displaced a number of residents. It's difficult, however, to discern the book's plot, with a cat's childlike worldview butting up against more kaleidoscopic narrators, resulting in a head-spinning loss of direction that hobbles this potentially endearing novel. Agent: Michelle Rubin, Writers House.