Romeow and Juliet was brought to my attention during a recent edition of Cover Snark. While the front cover suggests that this is a romance between two cats, the back cover copy quickly sets us straight:
Romeow and Juliet is the first in a cozy mystery series set on Madrona Island, a fictional island within the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State. As a fourth generation islander Caitlin Hart is struggling to make her way as the economy and culture of the island evolves toward a tourism based industry. Cait lives in a cabin on her aunt’s oceanfront estate where she helps her aunt run Harthaven Cat Sanctuary. When she isn’t working with the cats, she helps best friend Tara, operate the coffee bar/bookstore/cat lounge they own, named Coffee Cat Books.
In the first installment to the series Cait and her dog Max find the body of a member of the island council dead in the back room of the old fish cannery. As Cait delves into the murder she finds herself with an unlikely sleuthing partner that might just lead to a relationship of a more personal kind.
Meanwhile, Romeo, a stray cat that followed Cait home, is causing all sorts of problems for Cait as, in spite of dire warnings from the neighbor next door, he refuses to stay away from her very expensive show cat, Juliet. Could Romeo really be trying to tell Cait something about the neighbor that she initially refuses to see?
The answer to that last question is “no.” Also it’s untrue that Caitlin helps run a coffee shop. She and her best friend are trying to open one. There are no signs of Caitlin actually earning a living or doing any kind of actual work.
While I cannot blame the author or publisher for my heartbreak with regard to Shakespearean cats, the fact remains that I still yearn to hear Shakespeare performed by two cats meowing in iambic pentameter, with happy endings all around. I hoped for a book that would be terrible yet fun, but I just got terrible.
There are many problems with this book. The protagonist, Caitlin Hart, appears to be an awful person who, among other things fat-shames her best friend, but no one seems to notice just how self-absorbed the protagonist is. The entire book is exposition – clunky, drawn out, miserably paced exposition. I finished the book yesterday and I’ve already forgotten who dunnit because I don’t care. I also can’t remember whether the flirty romance between two humans worked out or not – again, don’t care.
However, the main problem with the book is that even though it’s a contemporary set in what is supposed to be our real world, very few things have much to do with reality. Therefore, the rest of this review is just a series of questions. Disclaimer – when I read this, my kid and I were both down with colds. Maybe this book makes perfect sense. Maybe a healthy reader will answer my questions to my total satisfaction. Meanwhile, I stand by the fact that none of the people in this book have actually encountered a real cat.
- First, this is not snark. This is an honest inquiry. Would you buy fish from a fish market called For the Halibut?
- Caitlin runs a shelter for cats. I do not. However, some friends and I have been working together on spay/neutering adult members of a local feral cat colony (we trap, neuter, and release) and rescuing feral kittens, so I do have some experience with what shape the typical feral is in. Early in the book, Caitlin takes in a feral male she names ‘Romeo’. When she finds that he has fleas she has to have her house fumigated.
My question is: Doesn’t Caitlin have any standard procedures for intake? Doesn’t she treat the ferals for fleas and internal parasites immediately and certainly before exposing them to other cats or the rest of her home? Does she have to fumigate her house every single time she deals with a new feral? Are there ANY ferals who don’t have fleas, and if so, why can’t I take some of those in my car to the SPCA Vet Clinic instead of my current situation in which I regularly encounter fleas on kittens which are almost as big as the actual kittens? What is happening here?
- One of the subplots is that Romeo, who remains an outdoor cat, keeps trying to sneak onto the neighbor’s property to court the neighbor’s pedigreed cat, Juliet. At first I asked why this owner didn’t keep Juliet inside, but eventually the owner explains that Juliet is supposed to stay inside but keeps escaping – fair enough. Which leads to the question of why on earth Caitlin doesn’t immediately take Romeo to the vet for a teensy operation? Why does Caitlin seem to think that the idea of more kittens is cute? I mean, yes, kittens are cute, but Caitlin has plenty of kittens to rehome already. What kind of cat rescuer doesn’t spay or neuter cats right away?
- Romeo and Juliet are “cute” together, sneaking around silently and holding paws. Have these characters ever been around a cat in heat? Do they know that they are very loud? Has anyone told Caitlin and everyone else that cats have barbed penises? No? Ah, well.
- Now, on to Caitlin’s other problems. She states that the time she lost her virginity was the best sex she ever had. I am skeptical, and if she’s being truthful, then I am depressed on her behalf.
- When Caitlin and Cole (he’s some guy, it’s not important) were teenagers, Caitlin had a crush on Cole. Cole enlisted in the Navy and was supposed to leave right after graduation. Caitlin, who knew this, pressured Cole into having sex and then was furious when he still joined the Navy. As an adult, Caitlin admits that maybe she was unreasonable, but adult Caitlin is still angry with Cole. My question is – What the Hell, Adult Caitlin?
A day after reading this book, I’m actually angry about it. It makes me actually FURIOUS that someone would be seen as laudable while also fat-shaming her best friend. It makes me FURIOUS that someone would encourage the conception of unwanted kittens. Caitlin is a manipulative, controlling snob who is never seen doing any actual work. I hope she moves to the mainland so that her friend can run the bookstore/cat cafe and eat whatever she wants to in peace. I also hope that I never have to read this much exposition ever again.
Also, please spay and neuter your cats!
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Ugh. This book sounds terrible. I can’t do anything about your desire for “cats performing Shakespeare with happy ending and meowing in iambic pentameter”, but at least you can listen to the Jingle Cats cds – cats meowing and purring Christmas carols. It’s adorable and a staple this time of year in the buyback section of the bookstore I work at.
No comment on the book, but I can help with Romeo and Juliet with cats! Armand Acosta’s 1990 film Romeo.Juliet is not widely available, but it is feral cats dubbed by English actors!
“Feral cats dubbed by English actors” is a series of words I didn’t know I wanted in my life BUT I TOTALLY DO. Thank you!
Are there any cat romance books out there? I am not talking about shapeshifters or human romances featuring cats but books with leading cat couples. Recs would be welcome! If there are none, I feel like this is an untapped market. A good author could make a barbed cat penis sexy.
How an author can center a book around a topic without actually knowing as much or more about it than their target audience eacapes me. I, too, have experience with feral cats and WTF?
The last cozy I read was quilt themed. It was clear the author had seen a quilt at some point, but knew little to nothing about actual quilting. One of the few books I ever threw away. Couldn’t risk another quilter getting sucked in by donating it.
I would in fact buy fish from a fish market called For the Halibut, but I am a fan of awful puns.
I would also buy fish from “For The Halibut.” I used to subscribe to a weekly fish subscription service called “Afishionado.” Like @Stephanie, I am a fan of puns!
And thank you for reading this book so the rest of us don’t have to.
Um, as someone who has worked in animal shelters for many years, is currently in vet school, and has been working with a TNR program recently; I can think of literally 0 instances in which upon trapping/rescuing an unaltered cat they were not spayed or neutered before being allowed to mingle with other cats. Also, the pedigreed cat would also probably be spayed unless she is a breeder, in which case I highly doubt the owner would not make changes to their home to keep her from escaping. Especially with a nearby feral cat colony!
Also why is this woman who supposedly helps run a cat shelter taking a feral cat into her home?? Even the most cat obssessed people I know who work in shelters understand the difference between a feral adult male (unaltered especially) and a cat that can be socialized and allowed in your home?
Yikes
For The Halibut is delightful. My issue is with the supposed coffee shop mentioned in the blurb – Coffee Cat Books? Is that seriously the name? Let me just run down to my local drugstore, Candy Cough Drops Hemorrhoid Cream.
Also, what the hell, Adult Caitlin? You sound awful.
It lost me at the words “works with cats.” One does not work with cats.
I read a novella by a very famous author who shall remain nameless, in case she feels like scuppering my career, and this was the entirety of the notes I made for myself about it: “It sucks because the main point is that his cat impregnates hers and we’re supposed to just go along with this. THEY SHOULD HAVE NEUTERED THEIR DAMN CATS.” Yeah I’m still mad.
The book sounds terrible, but the review was great. Thank you!
It sounds as if this book could have been such a cool example of competence p@rn. All the details that go into running a shelter, how cats are helped, and how they get forever homes? I’d read that! There’d be helpful information, too, about how many cats and kittens lives are brutally short due to overpopulation. Also, the preventable illness such as FIV and FELV would be highlighted, like, you’d never just let a homeless (stray or feral, right?) socialize with other cats before being checked.
Thank you for this review, Carrie, which allows me to share your rage without actually having to read this book. I foster cats and kittens and have helped with TNR projects, and yeah, it sounds like the author knows nothing about animal rescue or feral cats.
And bless you for your TNR work, because that can be some hard work – but it’s so cool when you can see a feral colony go from a bunch of hungry, sickly cats to a stable, reasonably healthy group (which takes more than TNR, but that’s a good place to start).
Yeah, this sounds terrible. Apart from anything else cat characters ought to act like cats! “Holding paws,” WTF? My male cat loves my female cat (they’re fixed) and it’s adorable but very catlike. When they were introduced you could tell he was instantly fascinated by her. She thinks he’s a bit of a pest because he’s awkward. He charges up to her and starts rubbing against and head-butting her and at least once knocked her over. The other day he lay down on top of her and was so happy he started drooling. She had an expression like “I’m not sure I like this but if you do me the favor of grooming the back of my head I’ll put up with it.”
I have seen cat friendships where both parties love each other intensely and it’s heartwarming but not like human romance. And sex has nothing to do with it. Cat sex is raw, urgent, and utterly unomantic.
I have run into so many cozies with fat shaming lately. The last one I started (didn’t make it through the first chapter) had the protagonist complaining about skinny women in one paragraph and then viciously mentally fat shaming a customer in the next. I just couldn’t.
@DonnaMarie, I recently read a cozy that was knitting themed that had the same problem. The author knew basic things like that the knit stitch and the purl stitch were different but knew nothing about knitting culture. Which is a problem for a series set at knitting retreats.
If anyone could recommend a cozy series with all around positivity towards ladies, no fat shaming, and some idea of the culture it is invoking, please let me know.
I can’t offer cat romances, but I remember liking Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams, which is a cat fantasy. Be aware though, that it has been literally decades since I read it and the suck fairy may have visited.
@ DonnaMarie “the author had seen a quilt”
LMAO
I remember reading a WSJ review of “Romeo.Juliet” a long time ago, and always wanted to see it but never could find it. Except I’ve always been afraid that it has a tragic end. I mean, “The Abandoned” was almost too much for me. I need happy endings for my fictional cats.
p.s. this book sounds ludicrous. What is it with “cozy” mysteries? What is the appeal of having off-camera crimes, inevitably in a small town which is, one would think, short on disposable characters, in which people indubitably die, but the crime is so obvious that it can be solved in the absence of any kind of investigative skills or forensic resources by an utter amateur, who never seems to have a real job except some kind of cutely conceived arts-and-crafts-and-tea-shops self-employment which never requires doing any damn work? The self-employed people I know all work 10+ hours a day. … It seems like the whole genre requires a reader who loves the idea of small towns but hates many people in them (thus, killing them off) and who fantasizes about being able to solve crimes while knitting, or making cocoa, or whatever. When I fantasize about solving crimes it’s in the context of, you know, LAW ENFORCEMENT. Yeesh.
/sub-rant
Well, I will say that for an anthropomorphic book, Tailchaser’s Song depicts cats better than some (better than The Book of Night with Moon, for example). It’s not cozy, it gets very dark and gruesome in places. And as for the issue of spaying/neutering… It’s told from the point of view of fetal cats who think s/n is horrifying. One character tells a story which as I recall is meant as a warning to stay away from humans. He tells about a tomcat who meets an enchantingly beautiful female and wants to romance her (again with the anthropomorphism) and when the other explains that he is a neutered male, the tomcat is extremely horrified about having been fooled and runs away. (Now that I think about it, the whole way that story is told is strongly reminiscent of transphobic anecdotes.) As I recall the gender politics of that book bothered me when I read it years ago.
A cat book that has sex is Felidae by Akif Pirinci. Good cat writing but its genre is emphatically horror, with plenty of cats harmed.
If you want good (but fantasy) cat books, read Erin Hunter’s Warriors series. It’s totally cat soap opera with religion and no sex (for the kids) and cats that mate for life, etc. But the cat soap opera is truly compelling.
@Morgan my daughter is INSANE for those Warriors books. Every time I open one, though, there’s another grand battle going on and I can’t. But she loves them.
I won’t be reading this book, but I cackle-laughed at For the Halibut. I don’t eat fish, but would totally shop at a fish store with that name if I did eat it.
Over the summer, my aunts called a supposed TNR organization to capture, fix, and release a Mama cat and her kittens. The day after capture, my aunt called to see how they were doing and was told that they were going to kill all of the cats, none of which were sick. Even worse, the mother cat was in labor with a new set of kittens, which would also be killed after birth. Of course my aunts couldn’t let that happen, so they fought to get them back from the “shelter.” The first set of kittens have all been adopted by loving families and the babies happy and healthy with my aunts. Within the next few weeks, they’re going to be adopted out too.
We never had the sushi at “Something Fishy”. Real place, now mysteriously closed. The rest of your review sounds right on target to me.
Check out the 1962 movie Gay Purr-ee for that cat story you’re looking for. From Wikipedia: This animated musical concerns Mewsette (Judy Garland), a starry-eyed cat who grows weary of life on a French farm and heads for the excitement of 1890s Paris. Her tomcat suitor, Jaune-Tom (Robert Goulet),and his furry cohort, Robespierre (Red Buttons), chase after Mewsette, but she’s already fallen under the spell of a feline modeling-school racket run by the plump Madame Rubens-Chatte (Hermione Gingold) and her slimy assistant, Meowrice. Can Mewsette avoid corruption in the big city?
@Dr. Opossum: Shirley Rousseau Murphy’s Joe Grey mystery series kinda fits the bill. (Note: the books are not cozies and can get pretty dark on occasion.)
“As Cait delves into the murder …” You know, just stop right there and let me add my rant to @chacha1. We–meaning non-law enforcement people–just don’t do that. We don’t have the tools or experience, we don’t have an inside track.
Anyone who has experienced, however closely or remotely, the horror of such a crime would never set out to “solve” it. We may have questions, we definitely need answers, but this entire genre of cozy mysteries with their cute titles and covers piss me off no end. There is nothing cute or cozy about murder, nothing. /rant
Like Scifigirl1986, I too do not eat fish but if I did I would totally shop at For the Halibut – if there are any other über Disney World fans out there (which saying I am would be a major underestimate), “For the Halibut” is the punch line to a joke in the The Muppets 3-D show at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, so it makes me smile.
I am going to stand up for cozy mysteries – they have a semi-regular place in my rotation. Right now I am reading the Paws and Claws series (aside from the high murder rate, I would love to live in a town that pet friendly), the Cupcake Bakery Mystery series (by Jenn Mckinlay) and the Agatha Raisin series by MC Beaton. Agatha Raisin is a very very grumpy and sharp-edged heroine – and can be mean to both men and women – so steer clear if that isn’t your thing. I have only read the first two Paws and Claws books but it is generally, although not entirely, very female positive. I read the first in the very popular Hannah Swensen series and she was just too judgmental of other women including being super critical of her own sister (for no apparant reason other than she just made different life choices) so I won’t be continuing that series.
For me the cozy mystery is appealing because there is basically a guarantee that the characters you get attached to won’t have anything terrible actually happen – the same can’t be said for other mystery series (which I also read). Also there is an emphasis on community and friendships which I appreciate (for example, in Paws and Claws – the main character runs a bed and breakfast with her grandmother). Third, they present cozy small towns which can be mentally appealing even if I am not sure any actual small town is like that and even if they did exist I would want to live there (kind of like reading historical romances – it is fun to fantasize about living in the past but am pretty sure I wouldn’t want to). Fourth, there is a puzzle to solve in the murder. As for the high death rate in cozies, that is certainly true and completely unrealistic, but I will mention the victims are usually visitors or newcomers, allowing the main group of people to remain untouched. It is comforting that even though bad things happen, good people stick together snd figure it out. Sometimes I read cozies because I want something lighter and sometimes I read darker mysteries – it is like do I want a light and fluffy romance or something really angsty and emotional? Finally I would say just like romance or any other genre there are good cozies and there are terrible cozies, but if it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing.
Some books should never be printed That was true in the day when the publishing companies had editors who decided what did and did not get published. Sadly too many books were nonetheless selected for publication.
Then came self-publication and truly ghastly assaults upon the English language were released into the wild and upon the unsuspecting public.
When I read about this book in cover snark, I liked the cover and thought it rather sweet.
Having read the review, it is clear that author knows nothing at all about cats in general and even less about feral cats in particular.
I guess people will write crap if they want to and I am grateful to all the reviewers who take the hit for us and thus spare us.
On the subject of cat romance, is it too soon to bring upthe review of Cat House written by the lovely Courtney Milan? It’s still seared on my brain.
It seems that “cozies” are the latest craze in which random people think “anyone can write that!” I read a terrible cozy this past summer, with a very similar storyline–protagonist joins best friend in some small town to open it’s first bookstore/cafe, and the protagonist hardly ever works, while at the same time “thin-shaming” her best friend (I suppose that’s the difference between these two) and also, there are cats, however no possible “romantic feelings” expressed between cats, although the cats are featured.
I feel that some authors look at cozies and want to emphasis on the “cuteness factor” of their cozy, or what makes their cozy different from all the other cozies (when the above example proves there’s very little difference) but the mystery itself leaves SO MUCH to be desired.
I may be charmed by a cozy’s theme, but at the end of the day, I pick up a cozy because I want to read a mystery…a *good* mystery. And much like romance, I hate that there are mediocre writers out there who think “these are the easiest things in the world to write”, to which they prove the point: no, they’re not, and you are a bad writer for thinking that.
Just wanted to throw in a mention of Rita Mae Brown ‘s Mrs. Murphy mysteries. Not much romance between the animals, but they do have their own paragraphs and help drive the plots. It’s a long series- like most of them, the later books seem to be less wonderful. But, the cats are actually cats and there are other animals, too.
I read and re-read My friend Jenny by Paul Gallico as a teenager / young adult. It has kind of a romance, but even though I liked it so much, the aspect that the male cat is actually a human boy was kind of disturbing to me. And there was no good way to end that story. I cried each time. But Gallico wrote good cats.
The greatest cat book I ever read has no romance in it, but was so immensely satisfying that I want to mention it here. Oh no, apparently it has never been translated to English!!! Someone must do it. The French original is called Pour l‘amour de Finette, by Remo Forlani. It is the story of the little people (and animals) surviving in occupied Paris in WW2.
My God this book sounds depressingly awful. 🙁 I was kind of hoping for campy gloriousness based on the title and (amazingly atrocious) cover.
@DonnaMarie:
How an author can center a book around a topic without actually knowing as much or more about it than their target audience escapes me.
I was disagreeably reminded of The Ratman’s Diaries (source of the movies Ben and Willard and possibly others that I’ve blocked).
Item: Rats in the book are divided into ordinary rats and “furry-tails”, as if the author had once read a description of a gerbil and missed the point that it is an entirely different animal.
Item: The narrator says again and again that he has no idea how to tell male and female rats apart. So help me, I am not making this up.
Cats and rats both show affection by grooming each other. (Oddly, it’s the dominant one that does the grooming.) Is there any grooming in R&J?