rotheche's reviews
29 reviews

 

I grabbed this because I thought I'd need an antidote to Mean Streak, the other book I was reading. I really did — and as antidotes go, We'll Prescribe You A Cat was a pretty good one. Which is not to say it's unalloyed sweetness and light. 

The book's starting point is that there is a mysterious clinic in Kyoto, that is only there some of the time, for some people. The doctor is unusual and the prescriptions he makes even more so — they're cats. 

Each chapter is a fresh patient and a fresh cat - there's Bee, who helps salaryman Shuta find out that...maybe he really doesn't want to work in a sweatshop office environment after wall, and Margot, who reconnects Koga with his family, and with his new manager. Those two are pretty standard stories. 

Then there's Yoyuki, a little white kitten, who helps Megumi and Aobi, a mother and daughter, reconnect, and helps Megumi with the memory of an abandoned kitten from her own childhood. In this chapter, I feel like there's either an influence from or a nod to The Cat Returns, a Studio Ghibli film directed by Hiroyuki Morita. Yoyuki, the modern day kitten, is named after Yuki, a little white kitten that Megumi found as a child; one of the cats in The Cat Returns is named Yuki as well. The movie's Yuki is similarly an abandoned white kitten in flashback. Now, one meaning for Yuki is 'snow', so two white cats called Yuki isn't itself unusual — but movie Yuki observes that "life is hard", and Megumi makes a similar observation as an adult that child-Megumi couldn't, that life as an adult is tough. I might be reaching, but it feels like there's maybe a little nod there. Yoyuki (the chapter, not the cat) also has the first hint about the origin of the mysterious clinic — Aobi, the daughter, thinks that the nurse looks somehow familiar, maybe like a woman in a maiko's uniform she saw at a friend's dance practice. (Maiko: a trainee geiko, the Kyoto name for a geisha.) And a neighbour in the same building as the clinic warns Megumi and Aobi that there's something hinky about that apartment's history. 

Then we get to the last two stories, Tank and Tangerine, and Mimita. These two are much more closely tied together — and there's a time jump backwards too, that isn't signalled in the text, you have to put it together. When you do, you can deduce the full story of where the clinic came from, and the identity of the mysterious nurse and doctor who prescribe cats to help humans with their problems — after all, as Dr Nikké says, cats are superior to any other medication out there.. 
Spoilery thought: 

There's something uniquely cat-like about a cat — even the ghost of a cat, if that's what Dr Nikké actually is — regarding cats as being far superior to any human medication, isn't there... *g* 

I enjoyed reading We'll Prescribe You A Cat and I'm very glad to read that there's a sequel on the way in 2025. Most reviews I've read about this book use words like 'quirky' or 'whimsical' or the like, and there are certainly elements of that there too, but there's also an undercurrent of sadness and grieving, especially as you get to the last chapter, Mimita. It's not overwhelming and there's an element of resolution to it. Overall, it's an enjoyable book, and a pretty fast read. 

 If you've read and loved Liane Moriarty's previous books, you'll probably go for this one too. She has a very distinctive voice and style that's pretty consistent throughout all her novels, in much the same way that Caroline Lee is a consistent narrator for Moriarty audiobooks. So, no surprises. 

It's a slow burn of a novel and, at 500 pages there's certainly room for that. It took me a while to get into the groove with it, which I think has to do with the way characters are introduced: the 'Death Lady' is described for quite a long passage by everything she isn't, for example, and there's what feels like a cast of thousands of passengers that it takes a while to get to grips with. For me in the end, I kept having to think of them as 'the bride' or 'the overworked guy' and it was fortunate that the text isn't subtle with those reminders to help anchor readers amongst all those people. 

Moriarty's books have one thing in common with thriller novels — conservation of characters and details. In thrillers, it means the inconsequential person or detail is going to turn out to be consequential after all, and that's the case with Here One Moment as well; if you think a throwaway line is just that, you're wrong, it will come back into play in the last third or quarter of the book, guarantee it. In one way, you can admire the craft; in another, it undermines the ability to get lost in the story — or at least it does for me — because you're always trying to weave the inconsequential into the web, caught in the craft instead of the story. 

Or maybe that's just me, I don't know. 

Overall, though, enjoyable and it picked up pace as it went on. 

 I'm a huge Naomi Novik fan — mostly due to Temeraire. There are two dragon-related stories here — one detailing the origin of the whole shebang, back in Roman times when Caesar was having some issues in Gaul, and the other a nice little bit of universe-crossing between Temeraire and Pride and Prejudice.
There are two other familiarities in a Scholomance short story and an earlier version of Spinning Silver, when it was a short story rather than a novel.
While I enjoyed these — Vici, the origin story of the dragon corps, in particular was fun — I'm also very grateful for the standalone content. In particular, The Long Way Round, the last story in the collection, looks like it's the promised 'sneak peek' at the next series, and I'll now be keeping an eye out for that. The premise is a woman and her younger brother attempting to sail across The Empty — the big sea nobody has ever crossed — initially in an attempt to foil another island's chokehold on trading but then for...other reasons (i.e. wizard did it. It's always a damned wizard). Tess is a great character and her relationships with her community are still only at sketch stage, but the lines are vital enough that you can see it pretty clearly. And they voyage of the Blue, a ship designed for long-distance sailng by her brother, is compelling. As is the society itself — Tess's home island is governed by lords who seem at first glance very far distant — but as the tale progresses, we learn more of the lords and their wizards, where they came from and how they manage their affairs and so on. The other islands are likewise sketches at this stage but, again, they feel real enough and I'm guessing lords, wizards and islands alike will be fleshed out plenty in the novel(s). 

Seven is another favourite. I've seen this one before, in Unfettered III. I won't normally guess at an author's intent or anythign but this felt a lot like ruminating on how much you give to your art — do you really have to suffer to be a great artist? Can great art come from practicality? Who can create great art, who gets to keep the gate? 

Something about Seven Years From Home reminds me of Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed — they're not the same, truly, but they both give the same sense of being in a truly alien culture, and ruminations on what bringing in the larger outside society means to the smaller one. 

Overall I enjoyed Buried Deep and Other Stories. The stories have pretty good reach across genres and Novik's writing is always rich with detail without being overloaded.