TREE OF CATS

The lives of a teenager, a cat, and a disturbed killer fatefully intersect in this novel.

When 13-year-old Ava Reed’s best friends go away to summer camp, she finds solace in Minna, her new rescue cat. But Minna is mourning the unborn kittens she lost when she was spayed (or “janed,” as felines call it here), and she is desperate to find her son Shoo, who disappeared before she was trapped and taken to a shelter. Shoo isn’t the only missing cat in Ava’s New York City neighborhood. Over the course of the story, driven by a fantastical imagining of the real and spiritual lives of felines, Minna—and Ava—will discover the terrifying reason why. This unusual mix of reality, fantasy, and horror interweaves the growing pains of a young biracial girl (Ava’s divorced mother is Black; her absentee father is White) with Minna’s painful estrangement from her adult offspring, her desperate attempt to reunite with Shoo, and her fraught odyssey through the spiritual plane of feline existence known as the “Catalogue,” a vast tree of collective knowledge that “grew from the memories of Bastet, the First Cat.” This is not a children’s book despite its deceptively simple illustrations by cartoonist Bechdel, whose graphic memoir Fun Home (2006) inspired the 2015 Tony Award–winning musical. Perspectives shift among Minna, Shoo, Ava, and the twisted scientist attempting to ascend to the Catalogue after experiencing it in a vision. Cats call cars “Borrowed Bodies.” Their mothers name them with “a look in the eye, a thrum in the throat, and a droplet of code from a scent gland,” and feline souls reside in their hyoid “purring-bones” that fly to join Bastet after death. Ava’s daily life encompasses her encounters with casual racism, a Black Lives Matter protest, and disabled and gay characters (her mother’s bisexuality is suggested). Sensitively observed, often gritty and dark, with a poignant conclusion that lingers, this book is Avery’s final work. (The author died in 2019.) Avery’s previous novels, The Teahouse Fire (2006) and The Last Nude (2012), earned the American Library Association Stonewall Awards for excellence in LGBTQ+ English-language literature.

Vivid human and feline protagonists in an engaging juxtaposition of fantasy and often grim reality.