Book Review: Cat and Mouse
Dec. 20th, 2021 12:38 pmBoth ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux and skygiants recently reviewed Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse, a gothic thriller written in 1950, and they agreed that it was entertainingly bananas with more plot twists than you could shake a red herring at, so of course I had to pick it up.
Is it good? Reader, look into your heart and ask yourself what "good" means. If it has something to do with literary quality or the likeliness of the plot, then no, I can't really say that it is, but if you're just looking for a sheer wild roller coaster of a read, this book commits to its nuttiness with a verve and dash rarely seen. Our heroine is Katinka Jones, a young advice columnist who gets involved with the mystery when she shows up at an isolated house in Wales to meet the young woman who has been inundating her with letters about her crush on her guardian... only to discover that everyone in the house insists they've never heard of this Amista!
And then we're off to the races. Katinka "injures" her ankle so she can stay and investigate - this is the most reasonable of the escalatingly strange stratagems that enable her to stay in the house, investigate, and fall ever more deeply in love with the house's owner, Carlyon. She accuses four or five different people of being Amista, nearly falls off a cliff a couple of times (AS ONE DOES), quarrels continually with a police inspector named Mr. Chucky (I just can't with this name), and continually spins breathless, convoluted stories in her head about the possible solutions to her mystery. Why have a writer for your heroine if she is NOT going to make up ridiculous explanations for the mystery?
(skygiants commented that it is criminal that Katinka's fellow advice columnist, the brassily cynical Miss Let's-Be-Lovely, did not accompany her on her mystery-solving spree, and I can only agree. Miss Let's-Be-Lovely probably would have come up with even MORE baroque explanations, not, like Katinka, because she actually believed them, but for sheer jaded love of melodrama.)
I will not recount the plot in any more detail, as I suspect this book is even better unspoiled. I went into it already knowing almost all the plot twists from these reviews and it didn't enormously impair my enjoyment, but I suspect it would have been even better if I could have gasped at every reveal - and then gasped again when it is revealed that this reveal is in fact merely yet another red herring! A wild ride indeed.
troisoiseaux and skygiants recently reviewed Christianna Brand's Cat and Mouse, a gothic thriller written in 1950, and they agreed that it was entertainingly bananas with more plot twists than you could shake a red herring at, so of course I had to pick it up. Is it good? Reader, look into your heart and ask yourself what "good" means. If it has something to do with literary quality or the likeliness of the plot, then no, I can't really say that it is, but if you're just looking for a sheer wild roller coaster of a read, this book commits to its nuttiness with a verve and dash rarely seen. Our heroine is Katinka Jones, a young advice columnist who gets involved with the mystery when she shows up at an isolated house in Wales to meet the young woman who has been inundating her with letters about her crush on her guardian... only to discover that everyone in the house insists they've never heard of this Amista!
And then we're off to the races. Katinka "injures" her ankle so she can stay and investigate - this is the most reasonable of the escalatingly strange stratagems that enable her to stay in the house, investigate, and fall ever more deeply in love with the house's owner, Carlyon. She accuses four or five different people of being Amista, nearly falls off a cliff a couple of times (AS ONE DOES), quarrels continually with a police inspector named Mr. Chucky (I just can't with this name), and continually spins breathless, convoluted stories in her head about the possible solutions to her mystery. Why have a writer for your heroine if she is NOT going to make up ridiculous explanations for the mystery?
(
skygiants commented that it is criminal that Katinka's fellow advice columnist, the brassily cynical Miss Let's-Be-Lovely, did not accompany her on her mystery-solving spree, and I can only agree. Miss Let's-Be-Lovely probably would have come up with even MORE baroque explanations, not, like Katinka, because she actually believed them, but for sheer jaded love of melodrama.) I will not recount the plot in any more detail, as I suspect this book is even better unspoiled. I went into it already knowing almost all the plot twists from these reviews and it didn't enormously impair my enjoyment, but I suspect it would have been even better if I could have gasped at every reveal - and then gasped again when it is revealed that this reveal is in fact merely yet another red herring! A wild ride indeed.
