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A review by booksthroughmyveins
The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
slow-paced
- thanks to @hachetteaus for my #gifted copy of this book
As a cat person myself, I jumped at the opportunity of what promised to be a Memoir about isolation, desire for motherhood and cats. Perhaps this is simply a matter of expectations, as it often happens with literature, but I did not find what I was looking for in this book.
Similar to Sarah Sentille's Draw Your Weapons, Cosslett shifts between her account of the first year of COVID —when restrictions were severe and isolation increased— and mainly research about a wide range of topics, from feminism to trauma. However, this style was unsuitable for what Cosslett wanted to transmit, resulting in a fragmented narrative that increased the distance between the author and the reader. The lack of conventional structure was detrimental to the overall flow and contributed to an overwhelming amount of seemingly unrelated information.
Structure and research aside, the personal paragraphs in which Cosslett explores her doubts about motherhood, mixed with the adoption of a kitten and her PTSD, did not grasp me like I hoped they would. Halfway through the book, I started feeling like I was reading someone's diary instead of a Memoir, full of unordered thoughts and diatribes. And yes, one could argue that Memoirs are deeply personal, just like a diary would be. Still, there is a clear, see-through difference between the informal and unpublished and the formal and published. Here, the formality and relevance necessary for publication were missing.
By the end, I was also deeply disappointed by the little content about cats. Cosslett focuses mainly on portraying her never-ending personal back-and-forth between wanting to pursue pregnancy or not and questioning all her life choices during the pandemic, and very little about her adopted kitten Mackerel and the significance to her life.
Overall, The Year of the Cat was not my cup of tea. A disorganised and unfocused Memoir that left me feeling displeased and disappointed, with very little of the promised content about the life-changing power of cats.
As a cat person myself, I jumped at the opportunity of what promised to be a Memoir about isolation, desire for motherhood and cats. Perhaps this is simply a matter of expectations, as it often happens with literature, but I did not find what I was looking for in this book.
Similar to Sarah Sentille's Draw Your Weapons, Cosslett shifts between her account of the first year of COVID —when restrictions were severe and isolation increased— and mainly research about a wide range of topics, from feminism to trauma. However, this style was unsuitable for what Cosslett wanted to transmit, resulting in a fragmented narrative that increased the distance between the author and the reader. The lack of conventional structure was detrimental to the overall flow and contributed to an overwhelming amount of seemingly unrelated information.
Structure and research aside, the personal paragraphs in which Cosslett explores her doubts about motherhood, mixed with the adoption of a kitten and her PTSD, did not grasp me like I hoped they would. Halfway through the book, I started feeling like I was reading someone's diary instead of a Memoir, full of unordered thoughts and diatribes. And yes, one could argue that Memoirs are deeply personal, just like a diary would be. Still, there is a clear, see-through difference between the informal and unpublished and the formal and published. Here, the formality and relevance necessary for publication were missing.
By the end, I was also deeply disappointed by the little content about cats. Cosslett focuses mainly on portraying her never-ending personal back-and-forth between wanting to pursue pregnancy or not and questioning all her life choices during the pandemic, and very little about her adopted kitten Mackerel and the significance to her life.
Overall, The Year of the Cat was not my cup of tea. A disorganised and unfocused Memoir that left me feeling displeased and disappointed, with very little of the promised content about the life-changing power of cats.