Book Review: Cat Tales: Smoke Cat by Linda Newbery and Stephen Lambert

Cat Tales: Smoke Cat by Linda Newbery and Stephen Lambert


Quote: She kept bending down to touch something. As Simon's eyes adjusted to the first grey light he could see shapes moving around at her feet, rubbing against her legs-- soft, fluid, furry shadows, like cats. Although they were shadowy, Simon could make out the different colours: black cats, white cats, tabby cats, pied cats, marmalade cats.

Simon has moved into a new hundred-years-old house, made of red bricks and ambushed with wild green. While his mother and father are busy settling down, Simon is busy climbing up the apple tree. He spots an elderly neighbour who talks to her flower, named like humans.

But as night comes Simon from his window finds out that his old neighbour is always calling out for Blue. A cat that roams around the fence but never heeds to anyone's call.

It's a sweet book, the language is an example of clarity but is vivacious enough for a child to imagine everything up while it listens to the story or reads it. It can be enacted as well.

Though I am far far away from my childhood, I still love reading books written for children. Smoke Cat is also a story that familiarises kids to the concept of care and love and death and teaches them that a happy ending is not always about girl meets boy and they live together. Happy endings are when you help people reunite with their loved ones, a happy ending is when you provide a place to the one who never had a home, happy endings are when you help an aching heart outgrow its pain.

Spoiler:

The act of planting a plant on a dead pet's grave is not new to me. Over the years my mother, sister and me we have buried enough of our pet siblings and put a sapling on them. I loved how little Simon gave his best to find that one plant that would honour Blue. As Hiro Arikawa said, a cat needs proper mourning, or we never get over it. Hazel's mother never got over the fact that she died before Blue and Blue passed away pining for her and was angry in death because he never got his plant. That made my heart split apart. And Stephen Lambert's stringy illustrations added more pain to my already pulverised heart.

P.S- look at the black cat in the photograph.