Curiosity Thrilled the Cat
Sofie Kelly
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are saved here.
This is my new favorite series. I’m calling it right now. If there was anything I could have picked up to fix my Cat + Gamer (Wataru Nadatani) hangover, it was absolutely the Magical Cats series, which somehow manages to combine a pair of magical cats with a library, murder, and small-town GBBO vibes. I don’t know that Mayville will ever supplant Shady Hollow at the top of my “Holy shit I want to live there” list, but this was such a promising introduction and I change my mind all the time, so who even knows. (And on that note I just found out that the Magical Cats books are narrated by Cassandra Campbell who also narrates the Shady Hollow books and my fangirl heart is SO HAPPY.)
Set in the more-or-less present day – I’m assuming around 2011, which is when the book was first published – the story begins in Mayville Heights, a small, cozy town in Minnesota, right next to Lake Pepin. Having fled an unworthy man who married another woman within two weeks of meeting her, 30-something librarian Kathleen “Kath” Paulson is determined to make a fresh start as far from Boston as a new job can take her. Hired by wealthy philanthropist Everett Henderson, the owner of the mysteriously abandoned Wisteria Hill estate, Kath is currently on a two-year assignment to oversee the restoration of the Mayville Heights Free Public Library. The library was originally built with a hefty donation from Andrew Carnegie, and, in honor of its centenary, is now undergoing significant renovations and technological updates. To this end, Kath has been working closely with Will Redfern (the general contractor hired for most of the construction labor) and Oren Kenyon (a supremely talented carpenter who usually steps in when Will drops the ball, which is always).
Despite Will’s strangely passive aggressive hostility, Kath has settled into town quite nicely over the last several months: she is good friends with her tai chi classmates, and she was even chosen some time ago by the local chapter of the cat distribution system, which supplied her with Hercules and Owen, a tuxedo and a tabby who were born to the feral colony that has taken over Wisteria Hill. All in all, life is good and work at the library is going swimmingly……….is what I would say if Will’s apparent incompetence had not given Kath a string of minor(ish) injuries and set the project timeline back significantly. With the renovation running far behind schedule, Kath finds herself at odds with Gregor Easton, a pretentious composer/conductor performing at the Wild Rose Summer Music Festival, whose Jupiter-sized ego sees nothing wrong with demanding that one of the library’s brand-new computers be set up just for him. No matter that the computer room is currently not physically capable of handling either a computer or an internet connection. The matter is not helped by Owen bursting out of thin air and attacking Easton’s head in the middle of their argument, but luckily Easton turns up dead the next day in the Stratton Theater, so I suppose it scarcely matters. (And if he hadn’t died on his own, I would’ve been more than happy to reach into the book and strangle him myself, because HOW DARE THAT POMPOUS PRICK MESS WITH MY KATH.)
Anyway, Easton is gone but not missed, mostly because he had a reputation for molesting young women but also partly because his technical skills – i.e., conducting and playing – did not match the level of sophistication and sensitivity demonstrated by his compositions. Of course, it’s not enough simply to shove him into the ground and call it a day, so his death is investigated with due solemnity by Marcus Gordon, the tall, handsome detective assigned to the case. As Kath is known to have had a run-in with Easton within a day of his death, she becomes a prime suspect, all the more suspicious because Easton was found with a note seemingly written by Kath, asking him to meet her at the library late at night. Though irritated by Marcus’s persistent belief that she might have been having an affair with Easton, Kath seems to keep running into him in odd places, and she also keeps giving him coffee and homemade baked goods, which she insists is sheer coincidence. Their burgeoning attraction is easy to ignore, however, in comparison to the two cats, who increasingly demonstrate unsettling abilities – primarily invisibility and the ability to walk through solid surfaces, not clear if there’s more – which they use to bring Kath various clues because they are sweet beans who are just doing their best.
A tangled investigation ensues, while the cats do their thing and Kath grows closer to Marcus despite her own irritation, though her work activities seem to get constantly derailed by the injuries she acquires from Will’s purposeful negligence. It takes a while to get through her infuriatingly thick layer of denial, but with the help of her tai chi buddies she eventually accepts that Will is on a campaign to drive her out of town, and has been sabotaging the library project accordingly. During the inevitable explosive showdown, Will drunkenly admits that he has been having an affair with Ingrid, the previous head librarian, and that he wants Kath gone so that the library board will be forced to rehire Ingrid. To be clear, Ingrid left that job of her own free will and has expressed no interest in getting it back, but Will is a card-carrying citizen of Delululand, so there’s no talking to him. Of course this is the one time Marcus doesn’t show up uninvited, but fortunately Very Good Boi Owen appears out of nowhere and attacks Will’s head, giving Kath enough time to knock Will out cold with a concrete-like block of overbaked cinnamon rolls. Meanwhile, Hercules – also a Very Good Boi – shows up with help, and Will is arrested, both for the assault on Kath and for his apparent confession to Easton’s murder.
However, Will just doesn’t fit well enough with the clues Kath and the cats have gathered, and she quickly realizes that Easton was in fact murdered by Gynwafar “Violet” Cole, one of her tai chi classmates. He was initially lured to the library by Rebecca, Kath’s backyard neighbor, whom he had victimized in college. Knowing he had been making unwanted advances to her adoptive granddaughter, Rebecca threatened to lead a Me Too movement against him if he didn’t stop. When he tried to assault her, she pushed him away and ran without realizing he had walloped his head on the way down, but Violet – her closest friend – followed him to the Stratton and encouraged him to take the aspirin that ultimately ended his life, waiting until she was sure he was dead before she left the theater. After giving her confession, Violet taunts Kath, telling her that no one will believe her, only to learn that Kath recorded the entire conversation. I can’t say whether that’s legally sound, but this is a book with magical cats, so entrapment isn’t high on my list of “You gotta be kidding me”s.
Following this revelation (and all the others), Violet is arrested; Rebecca, on the other hand, receives no charges. (It’s even possible that she might get back together with Everett, her college boyfriend, who still seems to carry the torch for her – but we’ll see.) Easton is replaced by Michel Demarque, a renowned composer and conductor and brilliant pianist, whom Kath knows as “Uncle Mickey” thanks to her actor parents; Oren takes Will’s place as renovation contractor; and Kath’s best friend Maggie slyly sets her up on a date with Marcus, to Kath’s embarrassed fury. I should note that the latest book in this series is titled Furever After, and if that book does not contain a Marcus/Kath wedding I’m going to fucking riot. For the time being, though, everything is good, at least until the next murder.
Holy HELL, I love this book. It seems strange to call it Millennial-coded when Kath has to have been born in the late ’70s/early ’80s (assuming I’m right about the in-universe date), but that is exactly how it feels. Kath is one of the funniest, most relatable heroines I’ve ever encountered in my life, perhaps even more so than the offensively relatable Halla and YES I AM STILL SALTY ABOUT HOW MUCH I RELATED TO HALLA. But Kath is a librarian, which is my most coveted job; she identifies local townsfolk based on their borrowing histories, LOVE that, I would too; she likes to have quiet nights in with her cats and defaults to peanut butter toast when she’s hungry, which she shares with her cats because OF COURSE; one of her cats is named after a book she happened to be reading at the time, natch; she is at her most lethal when some random chucklehead threatens her cats; she bakes all manner of lovely treats (aside from those concrete cinnamon rolls, which were a fluke) to relieve stress and feed her friends and one random detective, because her love language is most definitely baking; her ideal girls’ night involves snacks and drinks and obsessing over the reality show Gotta Dance, which seems to be an in-universe version of Dancing with the Stars. There actually is a 2008 documentary titled Gotta Dance, which confused me greatly when I looked it up, but it doesn’t seem to include Matt Lauer, Kevin Sorbo, or a crystal trophy, so I’m moving forward with the assumption that the name is a coincidence. She is also a devoted cat mom who worries about Owen’s incurable catnip addiction, and she speaks to her cats the way I speak to mine, and I love it. I especially love that her weapon of choice is a batch of ruined cinnamon rolls. That scene just tickled the hell out of me.
Almost more than all of that, though, I love that Kath immediately cooperates with law enforcement because bloody hell I am sick of the kind of books where the spunky heroine butts heads with the police and purposely withholds information because obviously she knows better than the actual detectives who theoretically were trained for this. The head-butting was particularly egregious in Brownies and Broomsticks; even Shady Hollow is guilty of this unforgivably stupid trope, and we all know Shady Hollow is The Precious. (Although in total fairness, in Shady Hollow the police are bears, and they really don’t know what they’re doing a lot of the time.) Kath, however, has a very straightforward, pragmatic outlook, and her biggest goal is to get Detective Gordon to stop asking her if she’s really really sure that she didn’t have an affair with Easton and the best way to do that is to tell him what he needs to know, which she does. Girl, I appreciate you. I love that her first instinct is to do whatever is most sensible without making herself into a doormat. She cooperates fully with Marcus, but she also makes it clear when she’s shit outta patience for his constant harping on her nonexistent affair with Easton. I am so in love with her perfect ratio of attitude and sensibility, and I wish more authors could manage it.
As for the cats, they’re adorable and they’re magical, so what’s not to love? I adore tuxies and tabbies – we’ll blame Hato and Archie for that – and these ones are so convincingly written that I am completely satisfied with Kelly’s cat person credentials. I’ve questioned a couple of things, but I’ve never questioned the cats. For a while I really thought Owen was straight up teleporting rather than merely turning invisible, but, ya know, I won’t be mad if it later turns out he can do both. I love his catnip addiction and Kath’s despair over that same addiction, and I can’t get over Rebecca’s habit of indulging him with the catnip-filled chicken toys that he habitually beheads. I will admit that I had some trouble telling all of Kath’s friends apart in the beginning simply because there are so many of them and there’s frankly not a lot to distinguish them in the dialogue, but I have always loved Rebecca, who is a sweet, nurturing soul. She is so genuinely and unconditionally kind to everyone she meets, and I’m really rooting for her. I would love to see her renew her relationship with Everett; I’m also hoping (and assuming) we’ll learn more in future books about her adoptive granddaughter, Ami, who is actually Everett’s biological granddaughter but for unknown reasons is currently estranged from him. I want them to have a happy ending. She seems like a really good kid.
My other favorite is Oren, who is so gentle but never stupid or weak. I could actually relate to him quite a bit as well, because he grows up with a talent he never asked for and doesn’t particularly want; but because he was established early as a musical prodigy, everyone expected him to go to music school and become a professional composer when in fact his passion lay in carpentry. As an adult, he has spent decades watching Easton rip off the music he wrote while they were at Oberlin, but he’s never said a word because Easton’s plagiarism has allowed him to pursue the career he actually wanted. But that doesn’t mean he won’t still show up with the receipts if Easton tries to pull a fast one, as he did when he showed up in Mayville and tried to trick Oren into writing him more music for free. And I get it, Oren. I really do. Of my own free will, I would never have chosen editing as my greatest talent, but it’s what I’ve got and I’ve been stuck with it ever since everyone started to realize I was a walking dictionary with an unexplainable knack for untangling weirdly written sentences.
I only have a few minor quibbles with the book as a whole, none of which was enough to significantly detract from the overall rating. First off, the writing’s not great, but I’ve got another sixteen books to go and I’m sure it’ll pick up over time. It’s certainly not bad; it just needs a little polishing in places. Second, diversity is nonexistent. If any of the characters are supposed to be BIPOC, it is not obvious; nor do there seem to be any LGBTQ+ characters, though, again, this is only the first book in an extensive series. This seems rather strange when the book lays such an emphasis on tai chi, to the point of using tai chi moves as chapter titles for no reason other than general vibes. I could’ve accepted that if the chapter titles had related at all to their contents, but, since they don’t, this feels too gimmicky to let it pass. I also feel Kelly tends to be overly reliant on celebrities, whom she uses as stand-ins for actual character descriptions: Everett is likened to Sean Connery; Uncle Mickey looks like Hugh Jackman; and so on. It paints a picture, albeit a lazy one, and I don’t particularly love it.
Even so, this has become one of my favorite books of all time, and it is an amazing introduction to a series I sincerely hope will become one of the greatest things I’ve ever read. Kath is a hilarious, lovable heroine, and if I were in Mayville I would absolutely be friends with her because she keeps her friends well supplied with homemade baked goods and I would be round as a barrel but I’d be very happy, okay. I love her little gang of ride-or-dies, who aren’t spring chickens but are absolutely down for a wild car chase based on almost no context; I love her cats, I love her house, I love her daily life. I even love her blossoming relationship with Marcus, godDAMmit I ship them. I was slightly peeved when Marcus first appeared because from the bottom of my heart I want a heroine who does just fine on her own, but I feel like I can get along with this relationship. If nothing else, Marcus is so devoted to cats that he spends his free time helping Roma (local vet; fellow tai chi attendee; all-around badass) take care of the Wisteria Hill cats, and if that isn’t the biggest green flag I’ve ever seen I don’t bloody know what is.
Long story short, this book is wonderful, my flabbers have been thoroughly gasted, and I’ve got the next two books lined up on my Kindle. I got to tag along on a murder mystery joy ride without ever once having to mourn the victim, which is really the best, and everyone got what was coming to them in the end, for better or for worse. While I personally am grateful that I am possessed of a quite ordinary cat who does not have magical abilities (er, to the best of my knowledge anyway), I have loved getting to know Owen and Herc, mischievous little magical lovebugs that they are, and I can’t wait to hang out with them again in the next book.
