Cat’s People – Tanya Guerrero
I grabbed this because I’ve been on a heavy nonfiction streak and needed something soft around the edges. A neighborhood full of misfits connected by a black stray cat with green eyes? Easy sell. I was hoping for cozy with a little bite – something akin to “Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books” – but what I got was… fine. Cute, even. But also incredibly shallow.
Núria is a 35-year-old barista who channels her anxiety into caring for Brooklyn’s stray cats. She calls her three at-home cats “the ingrates” and spends her free time wandering around feeding strays. She feels invisible, yet somehow half the neighborhood quietly adores her. Done well, that dynamic can be charming, but here it’s a tad grating.
The rotating POVs – Núria, Bong, Collin, Lily, Omar and, of course, Cat – should’ve added texture, but instead it reads like a roll call of “these are the people in your neighborhood,” each with a conveniently tidy arc and a few prepackaged quirks.
Bong is the grieving widower adjusting to life alone. Omar is the gay mailman craving something bigger while struggling in his relationship with Carl. Collin is the hermit writer leaving Post-Its like he’s in a Netflix romcom. Lily is the earnest runaway with a secret.
Nobody ever becomes a fully realized person. Instead, they all sort of perform their designated narrative job as we move toward a Big Lesson™. Nothing here is badly written, my main issue is that everything stays on the surface. The author tells you about each character’s problems without ever letting them shape the characters in meaningful or messy ways.
The audiobook didn’t help. Elena Rey really tried – you can hear the effort – but the performance gets a bit theatrical, especially with Cat’s vocalizations and Carl’s flamboyance. At a certain point I couldn’t tell whether the over-the-top energy was coming from her or from the material itself being hamfisted.
Around the halfway point, I realized I didn’t believe a single thing that was happening. Carl is a gay cliché straight out of a 1998 sitcom, conflicts were inflated for effect and while Cat’s chapters are genuinely sweet, the author is wildly optimistic about how emotionally perceptive a Brooklyn street cat would be.
At 56% I tapped out, mainly from boredom. There’s absolutely an audience for this kind of book – I’m just not that person.
Rating (story): 2/5 stars
Rating (narration): 3/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: November 9 – November 15, 2025
Multi-tasking: Good to go. If you decide to tackle this, the short chapters and unchallenging plot make it easy to follow along no matter what you’re doing.
