Dear Tabby: Feline Advice on Love, Life, and the Pursuit of Mice

by Leigh W. Rutledge

A self-help guide for cats provides advice on litter box protocol, avoiding automobiles, deplorable living room upholstery, training dogs and humans, and keeping a wandering tom at home

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction, Cats

112 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a cute book - basically a kitty spoof of the Dear Abby advice column.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cracked me up!! Actually had some good advice for humans, too, if the humans are willing to put themselves in the shoes of a cat. The answers to letters from humans were not as useful as those to letters from cats. I particularly enjoyed the one from the mother cat who asked when a "kitten" should be encouraged to leave the nest, and referenced her 8-year old son. I think my friend's cat Nelly wrote that about her son Pirate, who is still a mama's boy. Also contains a good reminder on the importance of not judging others and of not naming your cats stupid names.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is pretty interesting. It's about a cat who has it's own advice columns and it's the letters from the column. It is a fast read because it's pretty short.

[Inna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very cute book, with nice advice stories, has lots of humor and is a fun read. Definitely recommended :)

[Bebe Burnside · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very cute. If my cat could read, I have have let her read it. It does make you think the author got inside the head of a feline.

[Xanthi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't 'cutesy', as so many of these cat humour books tend to be. Instead it is actually rather amusing in a wry kind of way. There is even a little bit of 'bite' to it, here and there.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book and I go way back.

I had a great aunt who was a total cat person (I am not) and who often had my family over to her beach house (this sounds much fancier than it was, but I do not deny it was still a very nice arrangement.)

I have always had a fascination for Dear Abby and Ann Landers and all manner of advice columns. I would always read them in the papers as a kid, and for some reason my parents let me. Imagine my childlike delight to discover Dear Tabby, which promised advice column jokes. I read it literally every single time we went over to the beach house, which was a few times per summer, every year, for.... I don't know, several years.

When my great aunt passed many years ago, she asked that my aunt make sure I get this book. It was touching on several levels.

I hadn't actually really read it since -- it's been on my bookshelf as a kitschy object of nostalgic value. But then, I get a prompt from my reading challenge telling me to read a book with a cat on the cover, and here we go.

Basically twenty years later, Dear Tabby is still funny! It's a dry, loving satire of advice columns (which I still love; have you heard of Captain Awkward?) where the letter-writers are cats (and the occasional human and dog) and Tabby suffers no fools. Some of the advice is plainly good for us humans too, couched in not-too-obscure metaphor.

This book is just as I remember it -- a delightful way to pass time on a lazy afternoon.

Popsugar 2017 Ultimate Reading Challenge - A book with a cat on the cover