Love Saves the Day

February 4, 2013
Prudence the cat is the dominant of three narrators in this jumbled tale about the ways a cat handles it's a change of ownership. Prudence is trying to get comfortable in a new home with former owner Sarah's daughter, Laura, and her husband, Josh. Typical Prudence wisdom goes something like this: "Humans need holidays and calendars to tell them things cats already knowâlike when summer ends." Sarah and Laura, on the other hand, have a tale to tell, about living in poverty and losing belongings and the people they have each loved along the way. Sarah, a DJ in the 1970s who bought a record store on a whim, had Laura at 19 and raised her in a rent-controlled apartment on New York's Lower East Side. Cooper (Homer's Odyssey) folds into her narrative a controversial 1998 demolition of a New York City tenement that displaced a number of residents. It's difficult, however, to discern the book's plot, with a cat's childlike worldview butting up against more kaleidoscopic narrators, resulting in a head-spinning loss of direction that hobbles this potentially endearing novel. Agent: Michelle Rubin, Writers House.

December 15, 2012
The tumultuous life of a cat spans the equally turbulent lives of the mother and daughter who share her always-changing New York City existence. Prudence the tabby never expected to find the right human. Living alone in a deserted construction site on the Lower East Side, she's drawn first to Sarah's singing: As a feral kitten, music is new to her. And while she quickly gets used to the idea of having a "roommate," as she puts it, Sarah's irregular lifestyle means that meals can't be counted on. When Sarah finally disappears one day, Prudence is taken in by Laura, Sarah's daughter, and her husband and trades a bohemian existence for more conventional comforts. But as the tabby learns, even life on the Upper West Side can have its ups and downs. Not only does she witness the aftereffects of Sarah and Laura's often strained relationship, she runs into danger in the form of an innocent-seeming bouquet. Initially presented in the first-person by the cat, this book by Cooper (Homer's Odyssey, 2009) achieves a matter-of-fact directness that only occasionally veers into cutesiness ("[S]ometimes Sarah eats things that are just plain gross. There's one kind of food, called 'cookies'...") But Prudence's scope is insufficient to convey the entirety of this New-York-in-the-'90s saga, and by the book's second half, human narratives begin to take over. While these are often affecting--relating the different sides of the mother-daughter struggle--they seem to come from a different book. And real-life events, notably the city-ordered demolition of a tenement with some of the occupants' pets left inside, are not convincingly woven into the narrative. The result is moving but uneven, and even a feel-good ending from the cat's viewpoint can't pull the story back together. The follow-up to an international best-seller starts off well but falls apart under its own best intentions.

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December 15, 2012
When Sarah, her human roommate, doesn't return to their apartment after a few days, Prudence, a former city street kitten who has grown used to an indoor life of relative luxury, worries. But when Sarah's semi-estranged daughter, Laura, and her husband, Josh, arrive, armed with storage boxes, trash bags, and the always-ominous cat carrier, Prudence really starts to panic. The concept of human death is one Prudence is unfamiliar with, so she keeps her sense memories of Sarah alive in hopes one day she'll return, all the while learning to cope with two strangers whose newlywed status provides perplexing new human behaviors to figure out. Sarah's death is equally problematic for Laura, who still harbors resentment and shame from her precarious childhood in the slums of New York's Lower East Side. In this poignant tale of loss and regret, Cooper, the best-selling author of Homer's Odyssey (2009), once again demonstrates her compassionate fluency in felinespeak and proves equally adept at conveying complex human emotions with flair and sensitivity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)