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My wife and I are cat lovers. Yes, we’re that couple who rushed out to buy the book, Bad Cat—and who are still, after 8 years, fascinated by both of our cats’ weird and wonderful behavior. We can talk ad nauseam about how Goodboy likes to wake us up in the morning with a gentle paw rap to the head and a plaintive meow to the ear—or how Tinkles likes to be carried around for 30 minutes at a time in a hammock fashioned from the t-shirt or sweater we’re wearing, all the while purring like motorboat. Cat people are a little crazy and obsessive—and they like to see that obsession mirrored in their choice of cat-related literature. But I was greatly disappointed by Molly Brandenburg’s illustrated book, Everyday Cat Excuses: Why I Can’t Do What You Want.
Brandenburg’s book plays on the fact that cats, no matter what you want them to do, seem to have their own little agenda (or, as the title states, “excuses”). And for those of us who are cat owners, we know this to be true. However, Everyday Cat Excuses is let down by its poor execution with regard to both style and content. It’s just not as insightful as it could have been. The cat illustrations themselves feel
rushed, and therefore they lack any hint of uniqueness. In fact, the cartoon cats radiate a certain air of vacuity—there doesn’t appear to be any personality behind the felines’ aloofness. While some humorous “that’s so my cat” observations do shine through, they’re never of the “laugh-out-loud-food-shoots-though-my-nose” variety elicited from similar cat-related humor books—Simon Bond’s One Hundred Uses of a Dead Cat and the comic strip Get Fuzzy (or even Garfield, on rare occasions) come to mind.
What worked in Jim Edger’s Bad Cat was the incongruous juxtaposition of cat pictures with witty facts about the individual cat; it gave them personality. I still remember quite a few of the pictures and the captions (Playmate-of-the-Month-like), citing the cats’ likes, dislikes, and hobbies. What we get with Everyday Cat Excuses is neither particularly witty nor memorable. In fact, the last ten pages of the book feature the same illustration (two cats lounging on what looks like a rug), with different captions—one of them being “is this the end of the book?” I was left with the impression that either the writer got bored or she ran out of ideas and still needed to fill a certain page quota.
The gauge of a good cat book (at least for this cat-lover) is the number of times I want to pull the book from my shelf and go back to giggle at the illustrations and observations made by the author. Unfortunately, with Everyday Cat Excuses, there just isn’t enough humor or feline insight to keep a cat-loving reader entertained for more than the five minutes it takes to read the book.
If you want a good laugh (and a knowing nod) at some irritating, yet lovable, cat behavior, I recommend going to YouTube and checking out “Simon’s Cat” instead.
