Felix The Tomcat

I received a copy of this in an early review program. This book reminded me very much of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. If you appreciate that type of humor, you will enjoy this book. I liked the fact that this was from a cat’s POV and got to see things in a different way. The writing at first was hard to get into with the cat speak and typos (didn’t the Felix’s computer have autocorrect?!) but once I caught on, it went a bit smoother and was a decent, amusing(at times) story. Humor can be a bit crass and political so this is definitely not a cute cat story for kids.… (más)

I received a copy of this in early review program. This book reminded me very much of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. If you appreciate that type of humor, you will enjoy this book. I liked the fact that this was from a cat’s POV and got to see things in a different way. The writing at first was hard to get into with the cat speak and typos (didn’t the Felix’s computer have autocorrect?!) but once I caught on, it went a bit smoother and was a decent, amusing(at times) story. Humor can be a bit crass and political so this is definitely not a cute cat story for kids.… (más)

Disclaimer: An electronic copy of this book was provided for review via Library Thing.

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Readers will either love or hate this “ottobiography”, penned by an adventurous tomcat self-christened Felix, and one suspects the dividing line between the two groups will precisely follow the line separating those who consider themselves “cat people” from those who do not.

Felix is not the cuddly, purring fuzzball that makes certain (mostly female) types melt into little puddles of adoration. Nope. Felix is a one-eared, soon-to-be-tail-flattened tomcat with a cynical attitude toward just about everything in life, who drops his first F-bomb into the text on page 2 and gets (often hysterically) raunchier from there.

Armed with superior intelligence, delusions of jaguar-hood, and virtually unlimited access to nature programming (via his ability to manipulate TV remotes and, later, to utilize Google), Felix pretty well has a handle on his environment, only to find himself homeless after an incident involving an unlocked cat door, an angry raccoon, and a flatscreen TV. Undaunted, he sets out to find an adoptive family that will support him in the style he has observed on television. He quickly lands an ultra-soft gig in a swanky gated community spending his days being pampered and his nights carousing in classic tomcat style.

The fun here is in the journey. Felix has a … unique … approach to the English (and French, and Spanish) language(s), falling somewhere between Archy the cockroach and the lolcats of I Can Has Cheezburger? fame. This proclivity leads him into occasional conflict with his editor, and the exchanges between them (sandwiched into the text with increasing frequency as the tale gets wilder and wilder) provide at least half the fun. Much of the other half comes from Felix’s swipes at the absurdities of human behavior, with a healthy dose of fantasy toward the end, as a “sinus experiment” catapults him literally into the groves of academe.

It's no spoiler to say that Felix ends the novel with several lives to spare, and that a sequel is already in the works.… (más)