Book Review | Book Chatter

My daughter loves her books. We picked up Bad Kitty, by Nick Bruel from the library last weekend and we have been reading it ever since. There is also a “cat nipped” version, where there are actual bites taken out of the hardcover. That is the version we checked out and if you have the opportunity to buy it, I suggest that version. She really got a kick out of it. Great marketing idea.

Bad Kitty used to be a good kitty, until his owner forgot to buy his favorite foods. The next few pages tell, along with great illustrations, what Bad Kitty is doing to his home and those around him. He fights with the neighbor, he attacks the vet, etc. The pictures are hilarious. My four-year old was laughing out loud.

Halfway through the book, his owner comes home with his favorite treats, which are described in great detail and then he is transformed into Good Kitty once again. It’s a predictable romp but fun to read out loud. The only downside is that there are some words that a young child would not understand.. so I had to replace them with other words as I read the story out loud.

Because of the vocabulary, I would say this book is geared towards the 5-6 age range and will appeal to boys and girls alike. It’s silly but a lot of fun. Check it out if you can!

I had a hard time with this book. It started out rough.. got better…and then ended poorly. A young woman who makes her living as a pole dancer in a gentleman’s club, has a one night stand with a handsome stranger. We don’t learn too much about this stranger, but their meeting leads the authorities to believe that she is a terrorist. Instead of going to the police to explain the situation, she decides to go into hiding.

My problem with this novel was not her profession… or her lack of education…or the dark and depressing subject matter… my problem is that the main character seemed to to be driven, only by money, and not much else. I get that she probably needed to focus on something material, in order to get her through her grisly line of work, but when she was accused of being a terrorist… I didn’t get that she was genuinely panicked over it. She just seemed to flit from one location to another.. perhaps it was her drug use. She seemed to be looking at things through a filter.

In the first part of the book, we know this woman as “The Doll”. This is a good name for her as she appears to be very one dimensional. Towards the end of the book, we learn her real name and we learn some things about her that make her more real to us. However, I don’t feel that this information was given to us early enough.

One descriptive word that came to mind when trying to describe this book to my husband was “gritty”. The media plays a large role in this novel, and I kept picturing the dark, gritty quality of a bad news clip taken in some foreign land. Overall, the book left me very unsettled and disturbed.

If you want a departure from your normal reading, then this might be a book for you.

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