Algonquin Cat
Jan. 27th, 2003 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI had an erratum to confess anyway. The author is Val SchaffNer. I always spell it wrong.
And since this seems to be the book that is least familiar, I thought I should say a little more about it, so no one feels that they have been cruelly Led Astray by it being on the same list with Swordspoint and Watership Down.
Algonquin Cat is a children's book. The illustrations are by Hilary Knight (of Eloise fame), and they are to die for. Despite the fact that it is a children's book, I find it actually much more satisfying to read as an adult, because I get all the jokes about actors and publishers and writers and the Algonquin Round Table. The book has a very sly and subtle sense of humor, and is perfectly self-aware.
It and Watership Down are the only two animal protagonist books I like (leaving aside The Wind in the Willows, which is really about little Englishmen in animal suits). Tailchaser's Song is an abysmal effort to do Watership Down with a roguish wink to the audience--not as honest as tongue-in-cheek but also refusing to take its own premise with the gravity which such endeavors require--and I resent the blatant manipulative tear-jerkeriness of Black Beauty and its ilk. And the animals-with-human-intellect school don't even seem worth the bother. Why write about a cat if it isn't really a cat?
So now at least you have an idea of what you'll find.
And since this seems to be the book that is least familiar, I thought I should say a little more about it, so no one feels that they have been cruelly Led Astray by it being on the same list with Swordspoint and Watership Down.
Algonquin Cat is a children's book. The illustrations are by Hilary Knight (of Eloise fame), and they are to die for. Despite the fact that it is a children's book, I find it actually much more satisfying to read as an adult, because I get all the jokes about actors and publishers and writers and the Algonquin Round Table. The book has a very sly and subtle sense of humor, and is perfectly self-aware.
It and Watership Down are the only two animal protagonist books I like (leaving aside The Wind in the Willows, which is really about little Englishmen in animal suits). Tailchaser's Song is an abysmal effort to do Watership Down with a roguish wink to the audience--not as honest as tongue-in-cheek but also refusing to take its own premise with the gravity which such endeavors require--and I resent the blatant manipulative tear-jerkeriness of Black Beauty and its ilk. And the animals-with-human-intellect school don't even seem worth the bother. Why write about a cat if it isn't really a cat?
So now at least you have an idea of what you'll find.
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Date: 2003-01-29 01:58 pm (UTC)Hmn. I am now contemplating the ways in which slash fiction is not anything like actual homosexual relationships but are what many teenage girls think relationship power dynamics ought to be like and seeing something of a connection in the way that the Redwall books animals are not actually like animals, but are instead a sort of stand-in for (my) childhood idea of what people in a medieval community ought to be like.