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A review by nedjemet
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark
3.0
Trigger warnings: none of the following are discussed in graphic detail, but they do happen.
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins would make a wonderful movie or mini series. It's high action, full of interesting characters, set in a fantastical setting, and has a solid plot. Unfortunately, two of those elements don't work as well on the page. Or, at least, they didn't work for me.
This is a book about an assassin guild and we see several big fights go down. All of these fights were well thought out and would have been visually interesting, but this a book so there are no visuals. That meant that I struggled to maintain interest during several of the fights. They weren't impossible to follow, I just wasn't all that interested in trying to picture them because they weren't vitally important boss battles, so to speak. They were just random challenges that Eveen - our leading lady - had to face. A similar issue happened with the various interesting settings and character designs. They all sounded wonderful, but I'm not the kind of person who can easily translate words to a picture, so a lot of the heavily visual elements were lost on me.
Those are the main reason this book went from five stars to four for me. The reason it lost it's final star and ended up at three stars is something to do with the ending that I'll get to in a bit. For now, let's focus on the main story.
I thoroughly enjoyed the story and - while there are a good number of fight scenes - it's not all fight scenes! There more story-focused scenes were great. Clark did a fantastic job setting up the world, the lore, and other minor elements so that every twist and reveal felt natural. There was never a moment where I went, "oh come on, really?" It all played out beautifully.
I want to say more because there's a lot to praise here, but even talking about the early chapters feels like I'm giving away spoilers because this is a book that never stops moving and revealing things. It is the literary equivalent to an action movie. If the premise sounds interesting to you, you don't mind some heavily visual elements, and you enjoy stories that don't take themselves too seriously, then this could be a great fit for you!
I'll end with two minor notes. One about the audiobook and the other a spoiler for the ending that did lessen my enjoyment of the book. It's why I rated this three stars instead of four. I heavily debated that move, but the more I thought about this one little choice the more it saddened me.
Audiobook note: an important, but minor character appears to speak in some sort of English-based pidgin or heavily-accented version of English. I'm not sure which because I genuinely could not understand most of the words this character was saying. I'm usually pretty good with accents so I'm guessing that this was a pidgin, but I can't be sure without looking at the text and I don't have access to that. Because of how important this character is, I'd recommend the book over the audiobook or in addition to the audiobook because I think a lot of listeners will have trouble with that scene which is kind of a big deal since Context clues let you know what's happening, but it still threw me out of the story as I went from totally engrossed to replaying parts of the scene over and over as I desperately tried to understand what this character was saying.
Ending spoiler:
Spoiler
Off-screen brutal murder of children, brutal murders of several adults both on and off screen, grievous bodily harm, temporary loss of body parts, surgeryThe Dead Cat Tail Assassins would make a wonderful movie or mini series. It's high action, full of interesting characters, set in a fantastical setting, and has a solid plot. Unfortunately, two of those elements don't work as well on the page. Or, at least, they didn't work for me.
This is a book about an assassin guild and we see several big fights go down. All of these fights were well thought out and would have been visually interesting, but this a book so there are no visuals. That meant that I struggled to maintain interest during several of the fights. They weren't impossible to follow, I just wasn't all that interested in trying to picture them because they weren't vitally important boss battles, so to speak. They were just random challenges that Eveen - our leading lady - had to face. A similar issue happened with the various interesting settings and character designs. They all sounded wonderful, but I'm not the kind of person who can easily translate words to a picture, so a lot of the heavily visual elements were lost on me.
Those are the main reason this book went from five stars to four for me. The reason it lost it's final star and ended up at three stars is something to do with the ending that I'll get to in a bit. For now, let's focus on the main story.
I thoroughly enjoyed the story and - while there are a good number of fight scenes - it's not all fight scenes! There more story-focused scenes were great. Clark did a fantastic job setting up the world, the lore, and other minor elements so that every twist and reveal felt natural. There was never a moment where I went, "oh come on, really?" It all played out beautifully.
I want to say more because there's a lot to praise here, but even talking about the early chapters feels like I'm giving away spoilers because this is a book that never stops moving and revealing things. It is the literary equivalent to an action movie. If the premise sounds interesting to you, you don't mind some heavily visual elements, and you enjoy stories that don't take themselves too seriously, then this could be a great fit for you!
I'll end with two minor notes. One about the audiobook and the other a spoiler for the ending that did lessen my enjoyment of the book. It's why I rated this three stars instead of four. I heavily debated that move, but the more I thought about this one little choice the more it saddened me.
Audiobook note: an important, but minor character appears to speak in some sort of English-based pidgin or heavily-accented version of English. I'm not sure which because I genuinely could not understand most of the words this character was saying. I'm usually pretty good with accents so I'm guessing that this was a pidgin, but I can't be sure without looking at the text and I don't have access to that. Because of how important this character is, I'd recommend the book over the audiobook or in addition to the audiobook because I think a lot of listeners will have trouble with that scene which is kind of a big deal since
Spoiler
it's the book's final scene.Ending spoiler: