The Book of Night with Moon by Diane Duane

[lightreads]

The Book of Night with Moon

3/5. A book in her Wizards universe, except about magic cats instead of magic teenagers.

So I picked this up because I had toxically overdosed on rape and sexual assault, and I was like Diane Duane wrote a book about magic talking cats? Sold! This is that, and it even manages to not be entirely twee about it, believe it or not, which is a remarkable feat for a book arising out of that hayday of twee books about talking cats known as the 90's.* It does have a surprise death in it that really got me. Though as I said to my wife, "at least it was only one of the humans. It would have been way worse if it was the cat."

Anyway, is it just me, or does this book turn the religious iconography up to eleven? The lone power as a serpent twined around the tree at the root of the world and all that? That has always been lurking just around the corner of the wizards books, but this one – which is not about humans at all – makes it much more plain.

*Okay, favorite book about magic talking cats, go. My wife hesitantly submits Tailchaser Song with a lot of caveats. I remember being fond of those Andre Norton books way back in the day. I read them in Braille, so I must have been... in elementary school?

Content notes: One vivid description of animal harm.

Comments

[katherine]

Nothing like magic and/or telepathic cats!

I just finished the first two Star Ka'at books, as it happens.

[lightreads]

Yes, those are the ones! I remember nothing about them except the spelling of ka'at, which is obviously glorious.

[katherine]

There are rescuing telepath cats, or rather ka'ats. Then in the second book some being rescued from robots, on their very own planet.

[afrikate]

I remember reading this and enjoying it enough. Eventually I went looking for the Wizard books. I liked the idea that a person’s soulmate could be someone not the same species.

[readerjane]

Edward Eager's Half Magic. The cat is only around for a chapter or two, but what happens when it speaks... well, at the time I thought it was the funniest joke in the world. I was in grade school, so.

[the_rck]

Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat had a talking cat, so did an old book called The Ghost of Opalina by Peggy Bacon which had a ghost cat telling children the story of her nine lives.

I keep thinking that I must be forgetting some others, but it's past midnight, and I'd probably have to dig through my bookshelves.

[lightreads]

Wow, it's a Lloyd Alexander book I somehow managed not to read? Or at least not to remember at all. This is startling.

[lightreads]

Oooh, Chester. Possibly my favorite talking cat of all time.

[cyphomandra]

I always loved the (possibly post-apocalyptic?) cat society in Dick King-Smith’s The Mouse Butcher, where the cats on a human-abandoned island have taken on the roles of their former owners. And also Carbonel in the Barbara Sleigh books (although witches’ cats could probably fill their own category) , and the neurotic and dramatic Chester in the.Bunnicula books.

[jadelennox]

I have this book I loved at the library when I was a kid, and I eventually bought it from the library as a discard, called Grimbold's Other World, by Nicholas Stuart gray. It's from 1963, and there's a boy who meets a magical talking cat and it turns out the boy is the lost prince because of course he is, and the cat is bitchy AF and also helps the boy choose not to let anyone know he was the lost prince, so he can stay shepherding. I goddamn loved how bitchy the cat was.

On the same theme, Mogget, from the Sabriel books. An utterly bitchy little elder thing trapped in the form of a cat, and I adore him.

[lightreads]

Mogget! I had forgotten him until you mentioned him, and then I was delighted all over.

[yunitsa]

Not a 90s book, but Erin Bow's Plain Kate made me cry, and when my sister recently acquired a very intelligent-looking orange-eyed grey cat I sent her a copy, because I believe in making other people cry too.

[lightreads]

Oh no, that's a crying book? It's on my read-very-soon-tbr as I love Erin Bow.

[yunitsa]

Not...in a horrible way? I hope you will like it! Erin is an old friend and I know she considers making people cry a badge of pride.

[lokifan]

My favourite magical cat - though not a talking one! - is Throgmorten from The Lives of Christopher Chant, closely followed by Bienvenuto (who speaks, kind of) from The Magicians of Caprona. Diana Wynne Jones' angry, grumpy cats that love and protect our protagonists: they speak to me ~emotionally.