FINISHED:

Iserles, Inbali. (2008). The Tygrine cat. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.

[Reviewing for ACL - will post review here when finished with it.

Here it is:

Mati, a young cat set adrift on a ship by his mother, Queen of the Abyssinia Tygrine, finds himself much later in a marketplace of an unfamiliar town. Here, he comes across the Cressida Cats, a clan of feral felines who live amongst humans in the labyrinth of tunnels below the market. Mati, after being banished from the clan for a crime that he didn’t commit, comes to understand that he is being pursued by the evil cat who murdered his mother, but may be able to fight back using the words and advice from feline spirits with ties to Ancient Egypt who live in the Fianey, the space between waking life and sleep. From the cover alone, comparisons will undoubtedly be drawn to Erin Hunter’s Warriors series (HarperTrophy, 2001-), and those assumptions are not unfounded – this is a story about warring bands of cats which even comes with a map of the territory where the action takes place, a la the aforementioned books by Hunter. The descriptions are often quite detailed and the action is brisk, but some of the details surrounding the ancestry of the cats and their connection to the spirit world are a bit murky. While a few of the historical details about the cats are factual, most appear to be fictitious and, thus, a librarian should encourage readers to do research of their own if interested in cats and their connection to Ancient Egypt. While not groundbreaking, this is a book that has a sweet subplot which lightly explores the relationships between cats and humans and is perfect for fans of fantasy tales where animals are the main protagonists.]


STARTED:
Lerangis, Peter. (2005). Smiler's bones. New York: Scholastic.

[One of those ones that I grabbed while shelving books at work. Just sounds like an incredibly intriguing premise: Eskimos at the turn of the century (1897) who are taken to New York to be "living, breathing museum exhibits".]

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