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Tree of Cats
The story of a little black cat and a 13-year old girl who team up to fight an evil mad scientist.
When a mysterious stranger kidnaps her son Shoo, Minna is determined to do anything to save her kitten, but her desperate search grinds to a halt when she gets adopted by a 13-year old girl named Ava. After Minna escapes her new home to search for Shoo, Ava goes on her own daring quest to find and rescue her beloved cat. Together, they must find out more about Doctor Leo Tyger. What is his real name? Why is he trapping cats in his basement? And what is making all the neighborhood cats terrified of the tree in his backyard?
Set in New York City's West Village, TREE OF CATS delightfully imagines that cats have their own Internet, an ancient information-sharing network called the Catalogue. Suitable for readers of all ages, with ten illustrations by Alison Bechdel, this is the last work award-winning novelist Ellis Avery completed before her death from cancer at age 46.
Equal parts fantasy, thriller, and coming-of-age story, TREE OF CATS celebrates girl power, the invincible feline spirit, and the love between humans and cats. If you adore cats and have ever wondered what’s going on in their minds when they stare intently at nothing, this is the book for you!
When a mysterious stranger kidnaps her son Shoo, Minna is determined to do anything to save her kitten, but her desperate search grinds to a halt when she gets adopted by a 13-year old girl named Ava. After Minna escapes her new home to search for Shoo, Ava goes on her own daring quest to find and rescue her beloved cat. Together, they must find out more about Doctor Leo Tyger. What is his real name? Why is he trapping cats in his basement? And what is making all the neighborhood cats terrified of the tree in his backyard?
Set in New York City's West Village, TREE OF CATS delightfully imagines that cats have their own Internet, an ancient information-sharing network called the Catalogue. Suitable for readers of all ages, with ten illustrations by Alison Bechdel, this is the last work award-winning novelist Ellis Avery completed before her death from cancer at age 46.
Equal parts fantasy, thriller, and coming-of-age story, TREE OF CATS celebrates girl power, the invincible feline spirit, and the love between humans and cats. If you adore cats and have ever wondered what’s going on in their minds when they stare intently at nothing, this is the book for you!
273 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 25, 2020
7 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Ellis Avery
10 books104 followersThe only writer ever to have received the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Fiction twice, Ellis Avery is the author of two novels, a memoir, and a book of poetry. Her novels, The Last Nude (Riverhead 2012) and The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead 2006) have also received Lambda, Ohioana, and Golden Crown awards, and her work has been translated into six languages. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and out of her home in the West Village.
Raised in Columbus, Ohio and Princeton, New Jersey, Avery’s first love as a reader was the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin. In her teenage years, she discovered writers like Annie Dillard and Virginia Woolf, whose lush specificity tempted her back to the waking world.
Interested in the overlap between theater, anthropology, and religion, Avery pursued an independent major in Performance Studies at Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1993. She spent the next few years in San Francisco working for queer youth organizations and earning an MFA in Writing from Goddard College’s low residency program. Drawn back to the seasons and architecture of the East Coast, she settled in New York in 1997, where she met her partner of fifteen years, Sharon Marcus.
After personally witnessing the devastation of September 11th, 2001, and the anti-war response that swept the city in its wake, Avery wrote her first book, a personal account of the attacks and their aftermath entitled The Smoke Week. She spent five years studying Japanese language and tea ceremony, including seven months in Kyoto, in order to write her first novel, The Teahouse Fire. A lifelong love of Paris in the 1920s led Avery to write her second novel, The Last Nude, a love letter to Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop and publisher of Ulysses; to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; and to the sleek Art Deco imagery of Tamara de Lempicka.
Raised in Columbus, Ohio and Princeton, New Jersey, Avery’s first love as a reader was the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin. In her teenage years, she discovered writers like Annie Dillard and Virginia Woolf, whose lush specificity tempted her back to the waking world.
Interested in the overlap between theater, anthropology, and religion, Avery pursued an independent major in Performance Studies at Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1993. She spent the next few years in San Francisco working for queer youth organizations and earning an MFA in Writing from Goddard College’s low residency program. Drawn back to the seasons and architecture of the East Coast, she settled in New York in 1997, where she met her partner of fifteen years, Sharon Marcus.
After personally witnessing the devastation of September 11th, 2001, and the anti-war response that swept the city in its wake, Avery wrote her first book, a personal account of the attacks and their aftermath entitled The Smoke Week. She spent five years studying Japanese language and tea ceremony, including seven months in Kyoto, in order to write her first novel, The Teahouse Fire. A lifelong love of Paris in the 1920s led Avery to write her second novel, The Last Nude, a love letter to Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop and publisher of Ulysses; to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; and to the sleek Art Deco imagery of Tamara de Lempicka.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 28, 2021
A compelling story that's almost a thriller, told from the varying points of view of two cats, a 13 year-old girl, and an evil mad scientist (the inclusion of the last should forewarn readers that some cats suffer and come to harm in this book). There's a fantasy element in that the cats have access to a spiritual realm, which they perceive as a tree, where they can communicate with each other and share memories. Basically, the internet for cats. Somehow, this ties in with Egyptian mythology. It's hard to judge who this book is meant for. The sections from the point of view of Ava, a bi-racial girl living in Manhattan's West Village read like a children's book, but the story line seems too disturbing for many kids (I should note, though, that I don't read that many recently published kids books, and perhaps nowadays they can be a lot more intense than what I'm used to). The sections from the point of view of the cats, particularly Minna, who feels like this book's main character, are very frank about cat sex, and Minna who, as a rescue cat, becomes Ava's pet, is furious and grieved over her spaying and the loss of her unborn kittens. This aspect of the book reminded me in tone of Paul Gallico's Jennie -- in other words, yes, it's fiction about animals but really it's more for adults. Writing this out, it's hard to imagine how all these disparate elements could've cohered as a story -- adding to the grab-bag quality are a few illustrations by Alison Bechdel (why aren't people more excited about this publication purely on this account?), which I enjoyed, but which also have the feel of belonging in a different sort of book.
Perhaps the fact that the book doesn't slot neatly into one genre explains why this posthumous novel was privately published, despite Ellis Avery being the award winning author of two well received literary novels. In any case, though I found it hard to get into at first, by midway, I was compulsively reading it, desperate to find out what would happen. The cats were more real to me than the people, especially Minna's son Shoo, a sweet special needs kitten who really tugged at my heartstrings.
A couple lifetimes ago, Ellis Avery and I attended the same school. I didn't know her well, but her personality had a shining quality, such that decades later, the memory of her is still clear and bright in my mind. What an untimely loss.
Perhaps the fact that the book doesn't slot neatly into one genre explains why this posthumous novel was privately published, despite Ellis Avery being the award winning author of two well received literary novels. In any case, though I found it hard to get into at first, by midway, I was compulsively reading it, desperate to find out what would happen. The cats were more real to me than the people, especially Minna's son Shoo, a sweet special needs kitten who really tugged at my heartstrings.
A couple lifetimes ago, Ellis Avery and I attended the same school. I didn't know her well, but her personality had a shining quality, such that decades later, the memory of her is still clear and bright in my mind. What an untimely loss.
October 30, 2020
I'm in love with this delicately spooky tale of cat spirituality. During a difficult week when nothing else can hold my attention, this novel gently engrossed me in a convincing fantasy world of cats, their thoughts, and their greater cat-ness. The interactions between the main cat and the others she encounters are so deeply catlike that I'm having a hard time remembering that this isn't a *real* account of cats' inner lives -- as far as I know. The illustrations in Alison Bechdel's recognizable, well-loved style pop up like unexpected gifts. I will be recommending this beautifully imagined story to absolutely everyone.
April 30, 2021
Really delightful. The characters and fantastical elements are charming and a comforting bulwark to cling to when the book dives into some surprisingly dark themes and situations. I loved the way she incorporates cats as characters and invents a whole mythology of cats, and that fantasy exists alongside a very grounded but sweet portrait of a 12-year old Black girl in Brooklyn navigating a time of change.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews