Kitty Cornered

My mom gave me this book because I have three cats of my own, but I just couldn't connect with the author/main character. He spends a lot of his time describing the myriad forms his anxieties take, which somewhat took me out of the story as a whole. I deal with anxiety myself, but I just couldn't identify with this. His cats are interesting and entertaining, though.

I finished reading this book yesterday and the first thing I thought of was, If you have cats, you will love this book. If you have animals in your home, you will love this book. If you need a good laugh, you will love this book.

I could not stop laughing as I read this story. Bob Tarte writes with sly humor about the trials of living with animals along with the impossibility of living without them. As I read along, I thought of a hundred people that I need to tell about this book. People who have cats. People who love animal pets. People who would never have cats. And people who don't like animal pets.

That about covers the entire human race, I suppose. Everybody would like this book. Well, maybe all except the Very, Very Serious. And, perhaps, those who have complete indifference to animal pets. (Are there people like that?)

So, just about everybody.

And if you are still not sure, here are a few quotes to test yourself with:

“...my thinking began to change after I married animal lover Linda....For our first Christmas, she surprised me (to put it mildly) with a gray kitten that we named Penny. Before we knew it, stray cat Agnes needed a home. Moobie came next, and her arrival sent me to the store up the street for another litter box. When I complained about my fate to the cashier, she said, ‘Three of them. You must be a cat person.'

‘Not me!' I told her, as if she had accused me of running a meth lab.”


“The day that I decided to adopt Lucy is seared into my brain like my first morning at kindergarten, the disastrous junior high date with Monica Plumb, and the Tom DeLay episodes of Dancing with the Stars.”


“'I'm going to take the collar off and she can lick all she wants. She can't hurt anything.'

Once again I proved to be as accurate as a placemat horoscope.”

“Frannie (the cat) could be quirky, twitchy, fearful, proud, manipulative—no, wait a minutes, that was me. There was a deep and possibly pathological bond between us, making me feel like she was the kind of cat that came along just once in a lifetime.”