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‘How to Wash a Cat’
By Rebecca M. Hale
Green Vase Publishing Co.
Hardcover $21.95
By Rebecca M. Hale
Green Vase Publishing Co.
Hardcover $21.95
Every now and then it is good to put aside all the serious reading and just enjoy a good, humorous book. As you would expect from the title, Rebecca Hale’s “How to Wash a Cat” is just that kind of book. It is her first novel and I predict that if she continues in her unique style, it will not be her only novel.
She is just plain funny, but she wraps that humor around a well-told yarn filled with characters you'd like to meet in person — well, some you'd just as soon not meet. The setting is in San Francisco, a place where Rebecca worked as a patent attorney before she decided to take time off to write this book.
She now lives in Grand Junction, Colo., and is working on a sequel, “Nine Lives Last Forever,” another book featuring the two mischievous cats Rupert and Isabella. Cats seem to be a favorite vehicle of storytelling. In 1997, Rodney Dale, a lifelong cat lover, wrote a nonfiction book, “Cats in Books,” tracing bookish felines from the Cheshire Cat to the Cat in the Hat.
Now come Rupert and Isabella, who just happen to be real live cats owned by the author, but definitely characters in her novel in which the protagonist, only identified as “I,” the person telling the story, is a nameless niece who inherits her favorite Uncle Oscar's antique shop after his sudden death from an apparent stroke.
However, she has suspicions there is more to his death than meets the coroner's eye. Especially when she discovers the phone call she received — saying an autopsy that revealed Uncle Oscar had died of a stroke — is a fake. Her suspicion of a mysterious death seems to evolve around a Gold Rush legend Oscar was investigating before his death. “It wasn't long before I realized there was a lot I didn't know about my Uncle Oscar,” she says as the mystery unfolds.
She meets Oscar's attorney, Miranda Richards, who will become one of those characters you would just as soon not meet in person. On her first meeting the dialogue is taken right out of today’s dilemmas when she introduces herself to Miranda and gets as far as “Hello, I’m...” only to be met with, “Oh, it’s you. Cut to the point.” Then she becomes aware that Miranda is talking into a wireless device hooked over one ear.
Oscar’s niece is told she should sell the shop and its inventory and move on with her life. Miranda is irritated that the niece wants to run the shop, and tells her Oscar has had troubles with his neighbors and the city planning board over the deplorable conditions of the shop. The planning board, Miranda says, is about to hold a hearing to condemn the building and she’ll have to do some renovations if she plans to keep it in business.
Miranda gives Oscar’s niece a tin box that contains a note from her uncle and a strange-looking key. The note tells her to take care of the Green Vase, the name of the shop: “...she's got plenty of life in her yet. There are so many doors left for you to open. All you need is the right key.”
With her two cats, Rupert and Isabella, our heroine moves into Oscar’s flat above the incredibly cluttered antique shop that specializes in artifacts from the Gold Rush era. She describes the flat as the result of more than 20 years of Oscar's erratic remodeling, “a series of irregularly shaped, mismatched rooms spliced together.” Moving from room to room, she says, is “like navigating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.”
Once she takes over the shop, she meets Montgomery Carmichael, a strange man who says he owns the gallery across the street and, without being asked, rolls out sketches of a renovation plan for the Green Vase storefront. From that meeting and throughout the book until the mystery is resolved, as one intriguing character after another is introduced, Oscar’s niece grows more and more suspicious of why so many people are interested in her uncle’s dusty, spider-filled, cluttered shop.
Oh, yes, the book definitely involves Rupert and Isabella and even a hilarious bath for Rupert at the instruction of Miranda, who commands it because Rupert smells. Uncle Oscar’s niece talks to her cats as part of a plot-revealing technique, but to Rebecca’s credit, the cats do not talk back, although the reader believes they are conversing by the skillful way the writer develops the plot.
In today’s popular use of cats in storytelling, this one ranks as one of the best.
<i>Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Thursday Opinion page of The News-Review.</i>
She is just plain funny, but she wraps that humor around a well-told yarn filled with characters you'd like to meet in person — well, some you'd just as soon not meet. The setting is in San Francisco, a place where Rebecca worked as a patent attorney before she decided to take time off to write this book.
She now lives in Grand Junction, Colo., and is working on a sequel, “Nine Lives Last Forever,” another book featuring the two mischievous cats Rupert and Isabella. Cats seem to be a favorite vehicle of storytelling. In 1997, Rodney Dale, a lifelong cat lover, wrote a nonfiction book, “Cats in Books,” tracing bookish felines from the Cheshire Cat to the Cat in the Hat.
Now come Rupert and Isabella, who just happen to be real live cats owned by the author, but definitely characters in her novel in which the protagonist, only identified as “I,” the person telling the story, is a nameless niece who inherits her favorite Uncle Oscar's antique shop after his sudden death from an apparent stroke.
However, she has suspicions there is more to his death than meets the coroner's eye. Especially when she discovers the phone call she received — saying an autopsy that revealed Uncle Oscar had died of a stroke — is a fake. Her suspicion of a mysterious death seems to evolve around a Gold Rush legend Oscar was investigating before his death. “It wasn't long before I realized there was a lot I didn't know about my Uncle Oscar,” she says as the mystery unfolds.
She meets Oscar's attorney, Miranda Richards, who will become one of those characters you would just as soon not meet in person. On her first meeting the dialogue is taken right out of today’s dilemmas when she introduces herself to Miranda and gets as far as “Hello, I’m...” only to be met with, “Oh, it’s you. Cut to the point.” Then she becomes aware that Miranda is talking into a wireless device hooked over one ear.
Oscar’s niece is told she should sell the shop and its inventory and move on with her life. Miranda is irritated that the niece wants to run the shop, and tells her Oscar has had troubles with his neighbors and the city planning board over the deplorable conditions of the shop. The planning board, Miranda says, is about to hold a hearing to condemn the building and she’ll have to do some renovations if she plans to keep it in business.
Miranda gives Oscar’s niece a tin box that contains a note from her uncle and a strange-looking key. The note tells her to take care of the Green Vase, the name of the shop: “...she's got plenty of life in her yet. There are so many doors left for you to open. All you need is the right key.”
With her two cats, Rupert and Isabella, our heroine moves into Oscar’s flat above the incredibly cluttered antique shop that specializes in artifacts from the Gold Rush era. She describes the flat as the result of more than 20 years of Oscar's erratic remodeling, “a series of irregularly shaped, mismatched rooms spliced together.” Moving from room to room, she says, is “like navigating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.”
Once she takes over the shop, she meets Montgomery Carmichael, a strange man who says he owns the gallery across the street and, without being asked, rolls out sketches of a renovation plan for the Green Vase storefront. From that meeting and throughout the book until the mystery is resolved, as one intriguing character after another is introduced, Oscar’s niece grows more and more suspicious of why so many people are interested in her uncle’s dusty, spider-filled, cluttered shop.
Oh, yes, the book definitely involves Rupert and Isabella and even a hilarious bath for Rupert at the instruction of Miranda, who commands it because Rupert smells. Uncle Oscar’s niece talks to her cats as part of a plot-revealing technique, but to Rebecca’s credit, the cats do not talk back, although the reader believes they are conversing by the skillful way the writer develops the plot.
In today’s popular use of cats in storytelling, this one ranks as one of the best.
<i>Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Thursday Opinion page of The News-Review.</i>
