Cat Love – Tomás Q. Morín
I genuinely don't know what I read.
On paper, "Cat Love" sounds delightfully strange. A calico cat recounts her life with "the Mustache," the owner she adored, after being kidnapped and placed inside a one-way mirrored box at an Emotional Statistics School.
Tomás Q. Morín adds his name to the long list of authors who use companion animals to comment on human nature. The narrator has opinions about everything from Michelangelo (David gets a pass) to David Bowie to Clint Eastwood chase movies. Meanwhile, the world outside has gone completely off the rails.
Emotional support animals are considered unethical, so humans now serve as emotional support for other humans. People throw literal pity parties. Crossing the street after the light changes can get you hit by a car because your destination isn't more important than anyone else's.
For a while I was like, "Okay, this is weird, but it's short, so I'll keep going." Then the novel wandered off in every possible direction.
There's barely a plot here, just a loose stream of consciousness that slowly reveals the cat has escaped her Schrödinger's Box while everyone argues whether she's still trapped inside it. She's apparently dead and haunting people, and somewhere along the way she gets green fur and an armadillo shell. I must have zoned out during the explanation, assuming there was one.
At one point she's talking to the aborted fetus (!!!) of the Mustache and his girlfriend. There's a lengthy discussion about Italian cows versus American cows (!!!). A defense of toxoplasmosis, and a man who can commute his prison sentence by walking to Canada without breaking an egg (!!!). It honestly starts reading like a novel created with Mad Libs.
The frustrating part is that there are actually some interesting ideas buried in here. The quiz interludes between chapters ask pointed questions about empathy, desensitization and our increasingly transactional relationship with one another. That's the novel I wanted to read (and, thankfully, I did next in “The Things We Never Say”).
It reminded me a lot of "Ducks, Newburyport" in its piecemeal, non-linear storytelling and "Before the Coffee Gets Cold" in its heavy-handed moralizing, except neither comparison is particularly flattering.
Oddly enough, I liked the final chapter best. Watching the Mustache rebuild his life after prison before eventually reuniting with his cat finally gave me something to care about after 200-pages of anecdotes.
I still don't know how I'd explain this book to someone else. I think this review is still going because I'm still trying to explain it to myself. "Cat Love" has flashes of good ideas, but they're surrounded by so many digressions and half-developed storylines that nothing ever comes together. With more focus, this could have been something philosophical and profound.
Kaniehtiio Horn and John Detty were both perfectly fine as narrators, but nothing was going to make this book work for me.
Rating (story): 1/5 stars
Rating (narration): 4/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (personal library)
Dates read: July 15, 2026
Multi-tasking: Not recommended. It's short enough that you could technically listen while doing other things, but I wouldn’t waste the time.
