Oct 9, 2015

A Circle of Cats

by Charles de Lint

This is the original telling of Charles de Lint's fable about a girl who gets bitten by a poisonous snake and saved by a bunch of wild cats. To escape death, they magically turn her into a cat. She doesn't want to be a cat and her first thought is to find out how to get changed back into a girl. At first she believes that fairies turned her into a cat, but an owl sets her straight. This story is rather brief; the girl goes straight to the spirit of the apple tree and the panther Father of Cats himself for her remedy. It's still got a lot of charm and good morale (about repay your debts and making wise choices) but personally I like the expanded version The Cats of Tanglewood Forest better. I'm glad he wrote it. The illustrations by Charles Vess are better in the second book, too.

I saw this one mentioned on Puss Reboots, which prompted me to pick it up at the library.

Rating: 3/5        52 pages, 2003

2 comments:

  1. Ha! I was going to say that story sounded very, very familiar. I read the Cats of Tanglewood Forest version of it. I rated it only 'okay', it just hadn't worked too well for me. http://thistle-chaser.livejournal.com/1450634.htm

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  2. My ten-year-old read Cats of Tanglewood forest about the same time I did last year, so just for fun I handed her this one too, without telling her the connection. She came back a few hours later with a funny look on her face: "I know this story!" I laughed and told her how the author had re-written it.

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