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A review by anna_hepworth
The Cats of Seroster by Robert Westall
4.0
This book has taken me many many months to read, and I can't point at anything in particular that is 'wrong', but I really struggled to latch on to the story. Which is odd, because much younger me would have devoured it in a sitting or two, and it is very much along the lines of the kind of YA that I'm interested in reading (although -- civil war, so not so much). And had I read it as a child/teen, I'd probably be completely enamoured of it now, as a reread - because there are so many details to go 'ooh, that bit, I loved that bit'.
The Seroster of the title is an inherited wizard/leader-in-times-of-troubles position, although much of that aspect of the story is told in hints and moments. Which it needs to be, because it is the story of a young man who becomes the Seroster, and his role in the defeat of the tyrant/usurper. But it is also the stories of the cats, and their societies within the human society. Not pets, not parasites, but something much more symbiotic -- the city lives and dies with the cats.
In some ways a classic quest novel, there are enough unusual elements that it would be simplistic to pigeon hole it as such. For me, the real stand outs of these elements are linked to the cats. Telepathic to an extent that they can manipulate certain other groups, a caste structure that comments on and mirrors the semi-feudal setting for the humans, and a beautifully developed religion and spirituality.
But it is very much a boys (and mens) story. Although there are numerous women throughout the story, enough to circumvent that common question of 'how do they maintain the population with that kind of gender imbalance', few women feature as part of the story. Fewer have names. (except cats. There are female cats with power and influence as well as significant story threads). And while it is nice that they exist in the story in good numbers, there are places that they could have been included as more than shadows, even keeping within the particular tropes of fake-feudal* fantasy.
* I'm not exactly sure of the time period that this was set, but there are multiple references to witch-hunts and the like. So, in terms of 'real world' history, 'feudal' is probably the wrong term, but in terms of a number of the included fantasy tropes, it is definitely that city state/very small regional focus that I associate with fake-feudal fantasy.
The Seroster of the title is an inherited wizard/leader-in-times-of-troubles position, although much of that aspect of the story is told in hints and moments. Which it needs to be, because it is the story of a young man who becomes the Seroster, and his role in the defeat of the tyrant/usurper. But it is also the stories of the cats, and their societies within the human society. Not pets, not parasites, but something much more symbiotic -- the city lives and dies with the cats.
In some ways a classic quest novel, there are enough unusual elements that it would be simplistic to pigeon hole it as such. For me, the real stand outs of these elements are linked to the cats. Telepathic to an extent that they can manipulate certain other groups, a caste structure that comments on and mirrors the semi-feudal setting for the humans, and a beautifully developed religion and spirituality.
But it is very much a boys (and mens) story. Although there are numerous women throughout the story, enough to circumvent that common question of 'how do they maintain the population with that kind of gender imbalance', few women feature as part of the story. Fewer have names. (except cats. There are female cats with power and influence as well as significant story threads). And while it is nice that they exist in the story in good numbers, there are places that they could have been included as more than shadows, even keeping within the particular tropes of fake-feudal* fantasy.
* I'm not exactly sure of the time period that this was set, but there are multiple references to witch-hunts and the like. So, in terms of 'real world' history, 'feudal' is probably the wrong term, but in terms of a number of the included fantasy tropes, it is definitely that city state/very small regional focus that I associate with fake-feudal fantasy.