A review by bargainbinkazbrekker
The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard

2.5

thank you too Harlequin Trade Publishing and Netgalley for providing me with an Ebook Arc in exchange for an honest review! 

I am the first to admit that Cats and History are two of my favorite all time things so when i saw the tagline and summary for this book, i was excited! in concept, this book is perfect for me but alas, in execution, it fell short.

i think for a book to succeed 9 times out of 10, it needs to establish a main character or narrator that the reader can relate or connect with. it gets more difficult when our main character isn’t human but an animal. i think with an animal being our main narrator, in order to have them be a head the reader wants to be in, a writer needs to establish an connection with another animal or human so we can better get attached to our animal narrator. Unfortunately, our main cat Grimalkin doesn’t really have any genuine feeling connections with anyone, so he becomes a bit of a mouth and eyes for the reader to just peer through. i being in Grimalkins head rather boring and tedious. he felt more like a clueless tour guide than a cat to me. 

as for the history aspect, the choice of having the historical context for each year Grimalkin visited relayed to us via footnotes was… interesting. i personally really didn’t like it, i felt like i was reading a text book and it took me out of the story— like who is adding this footnotes? can Grimalkin also see them? where are they coming from i’m so confused how this works within the story. 

Grimalkin learns about each new year he visits by observing new humans each time (for the most part) but unfortunately, i can really tell that these characters are just there to relay what time period they’re in, what’s changed, and show the passage of time. they don’t feel real at all. (personal preference, but it really irks me when an author overcompensates for a characters accents. like i could handle words like “feeling” being shorten to feelin’  or such but having slavic characters saying things like “vait” instead of wait or scottish one’s constantly saying “wee” every time they speak was getting on my nerve. just say they have an accent, the reader can take it from there).

the actual passage of time being shown from the same general area was pretty cool, and i liked the random cat god/lore, wish he had gotten more of that but i understand why we didn’t. 

there were a lot of stylistic things that didn’t mesh with my tastes, so unfortunately this was a bit of a let down. i wouldn’t discourage anyone from checking it out at least if it sounds interesting to them though! my tastes aren’t for everyone !