The Cats of Silver Crescent - Kaela Noel - ★.½

AUTHOR: Kaela Noel

GENRE: Middle-grade fantasy.

PUBLICATION DATE: April 30, 2024

RATING: 1.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Grabbed it for the title, the cover, and the premise. This was supposed to be a contemporary MG fantasy with talking cats. However, the fantasy takes a much darker turn than expected, the cats held no appeal after a point, and the story also was mostly boring. Overall, very disappointed. Wouldn’t recommend this to cat-loving kids.

Plot Preview:

Twelve-year-old Elsby is spending a couple of months with her great-aunt Verity in Rhode Island as her mother has to travel for work. While wandering in the back garden, she stumbles on an unexpected sight: a cat, standing on its hind legs, and dressed in a sailor suit. Elsby cannot believe her eyes, but the cat runs away before she can figure out if it was real or a part of her imagination.

At night however, the cat, along with three other cat friends, comes to Elsby’s bedroom, and begins to talk! They want Elsby’s help, and Elsby, being an animal lover, cannot refuse them. However, it soon becomes clear that the help goes much beyond what the cats initially revealed.

The story comes to us mostly in Elsby’s and the cats’ third-person perspectives.

Bookish Yays:

😻 Talking cats – the only novelty of the book.

😻 Great cover.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🐱 Elsby – Helpful. Animal lover. Bibliophile. Doesn’t know how to say no. Keeps secrets from mom and great-aunt. Not sure how effective she is as a protagonist. I found her lacklustre.

🐱 Verity and Rose (the cats' owner) – Very interesting characters but don’t get much page space. The big reveal about Verity at the end came out of nowhere. Wish it had been explored right from the start as that was the most interesting part of the book.

Bookish Nays:

😿 The cats: Bet you didn’t expect to see the cats in the Nays column! Neither did I! I usually love fictional animals. But that’s how bad their portrayal is. Each cat has a different personality, but the dominant one, Clarissa, blatantly indulges in gaslighting, manipulating, and bullying. She is rude and self-centred, and not afraid to guilt-trip her companions. As she gets most of the key scenes, the experience is irksome.

😿 The plot development: It begins with one idea, and goes into totally unexpected territory. There’s no connection between the start and the end.

😿 A major chunk of the book is about Elsby’s feelings of inadequacy, which is really disappointing when you expect a book about cats.

😿 The pacing is slow at the start, boring in between, and overly rushed at the end. One arc isn’t even completed. I am not sure if it is leaving the doors open for a sequel, but my doors are shut against it.

😿 Somehow, the tone of the book feels very pretentious, what with characters spouting old poems and advocating only classical literature. If it intended to create a passion in little readers for old-school art, it doesn’t happen.

😿 There are many plot points that I am not sure were needed. Cats getting high on catnip, sad revelations about what animal shelters do to animals who aren't adopted after 90 days, occult ideas such as interacting with spirits and spirits returning from the dead - how is all this built into a MG work? The occult content isn’t scary, I admit, but there should be some clue in the premise that the plot goes into such pseudo-horror territory. Some children might genuinely be spooked by such dark magic, especially when cats are involved.

😿 You can't create a villainous threat when you don't even intend to use his presence for more than a couple of paras in the climax. What a waste of an arc!

I thought I was being exceedingly harsh on an MG book, especially considering how I almost always enjoy this genre. So I passed on the book to my middle-grader, hoping to have a more balanced perspective from the target audience. She completed the book only out of a sense of obligation to me. Numerous times, she told me how boring the whole book was, and how horrible the ending was. She was also annoyed by something one character said to another during the finale, which she considered very selfish.

All in all, this is a confused book. Not ‘confusing’; ‘confused’. Like it isn't sure what it wants to do, and ends up doing a bit of everything and justice to nothing.

I don’t think I can recommend this book, especially to cat-loving children because they will be horrified at the cat-rep in this tale. But it *might* work better with little dark-fantasy lovers. Just in case there’s a sequel planned for the incomplete arc, I hope it sorts things out neatly, but I won’t be reading it.

My thanks to HarperCollins Children's Books and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Cats of Silver Crescent”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.