Dewey want better-written books? YES!: a review of Dewey, the Small-Town Library Cat...
From Sunday, 27 March 2011 to Monday, 4 April 2011, I read Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter (NY: Grand Central Publishing [Hachette Book Group], 2008; ISBN: 978-0-446-40741-0; 277 pps.).
Dewey had been pretty ubiquitous at the big box retailers that I shop at (Target, Meijer, Walmart) for over a year; being a cat-lover who is not entirely immune from cutesy-pie narratives about and pictures of kitties, I was sorely tempted to purchase it. Instead, I checked it out from my local library, and, boy, am I ever glad that I've got the money that I would've spent on Dewey to throw at another, hopefully better, book.
The pitch is all in the title: Dewey Readmore Books, as a malnourished kitten, was dropped one freezing cold January night down the book return slot of the library in Spencer, Iowa; the head librarian, Vicki Myron, a single mother with numerous serious health issues, somehow managed to convince Spencer's library board to let her keep him on-site (she stressed that she would pay for his upkeep out of her own pocket, supplementing the cost with contributions collected from the staff and public), and the rest is, if not history writ large, then at least a collection of heart-warming anecdotes and memories, which after all are the filler that make life tolerable.
Unfortunately, I found Dewey to be amateurishly written, even with the assistance of a professional writer and editor; I could never shake the suspicion that Myron wanted Dewey written so as to be palatable to people who don't normally read books (she mentions two of Spencer's mayors who had no use for "book larnin'," and one gets the impression that at least half of Spencer's library board saw the library as a glum necessity, like cleaning out the basement, pumping out the septic tank, or re-caulking the bathroom tile): annoyed with the easy-peasy sentence structure, I found myself muttering, "The semi-colon is your friend," numerous times while reading Dewey. It also doesn't help that nearly all of her attempts at humor fall thunderously flat.
The other thing that irritated me about Dewey was the way that Myron never broke away from special pleading; she never stops apologizing for her love for Dewey or how he brightened some of the staffers' and patrons' lives. I lost count of the number of "He's only a cat" or "How could a cat possibly..."-type qualifiers, and it made me want to scream: if there are any ailurophobes in the house, they are not very likely to be persuaded to become ailurophiles by this lengthy Reader's Digest-style paean to one special, gregarious library cat. For all that farmers damn well ought to appreciate cats as mousers and rat-catchers, if for no other reason, people with such a utilitarian regard for them aren't apt to protest o'ermuch when some persons of low character get their jollies from, say, pitching a cat or two into a bonfire (as the titular character and his college football teammates did in Sinclair Lewis's novel Elmer Gantry). Myron should've confined herself to one or two apologetic, qualifying remarks (if that), and trusted that the cat-lovers and cat-haters would sort themselves out.
And while Myron offers some semi-interesting bits of trivia (I was impressed that a library would have a large collection of cake pans that patrons could check out, and amused that Dewey's two favorite fast food items came from two of the three fast food emporiums that I formerly worked at) and tries mightily to present Iowa in general and Spencer, Iowa in particular as starkly beautiful landscapes peopled by generous, rock-ribbed, salt of the earth folk, she is not entirely successful in concealing the David Lynchian corners of Iowa life (not the least of her ex-husband). I realize that Dewey would've been quite a different book had she toned down the Field of Dreams stuff and spilled more ink on the Blue Velvet-type antics; nonetheless, I'm certain that I'm not the only reader who finds the fact that Iowa was once the state with the highest number of subscriptions to Playboy and the highest number of abortions -- intriguing.
The final, and most damning, indictment of Dewey is the fact that my, er, "allergies" didn't act up once during the account of the close of Dewey's life -- in marked contrast to, say, Peter Gethers's The Cat Who'll Live Forever, the concluding book in his trilogy about his Scottish fold kitty, Norton. If a gooey puff piece about a rescued kitty doesn't make me sniffle at least a little, then said prose is definitely sub-sub-par. But, wait! For those who don't want to read even a fifth-grade-level account of a cute kitty, it's being adapted into a movie starring Meryl Streep! Oh, gag me with a pooper-scooper....
In short, and contra Gethers's blurb on the back of the jacket of Dewey, cat-lovers looking for some decent writing to accompany their cute kitty moments should read his Norton Trilogy, not Dewey.
(My rating of Dewey? On the LibraryThing scale, 2 stars out of 5, because -- well, Dewey. Duh.)
Dewey had been pretty ubiquitous at the big box retailers that I shop at (Target, Meijer, Walmart) for over a year; being a cat-lover who is not entirely immune from cutesy-pie narratives about and pictures of kitties, I was sorely tempted to purchase it. Instead, I checked it out from my local library, and, boy, am I ever glad that I've got the money that I would've spent on Dewey to throw at another, hopefully better, book.
The pitch is all in the title: Dewey Readmore Books, as a malnourished kitten, was dropped one freezing cold January night down the book return slot of the library in Spencer, Iowa; the head librarian, Vicki Myron, a single mother with numerous serious health issues, somehow managed to convince Spencer's library board to let her keep him on-site (she stressed that she would pay for his upkeep out of her own pocket, supplementing the cost with contributions collected from the staff and public), and the rest is, if not history writ large, then at least a collection of heart-warming anecdotes and memories, which after all are the filler that make life tolerable.
Unfortunately, I found Dewey to be amateurishly written, even with the assistance of a professional writer and editor; I could never shake the suspicion that Myron wanted Dewey written so as to be palatable to people who don't normally read books (she mentions two of Spencer's mayors who had no use for "book larnin'," and one gets the impression that at least half of Spencer's library board saw the library as a glum necessity, like cleaning out the basement, pumping out the septic tank, or re-caulking the bathroom tile): annoyed with the easy-peasy sentence structure, I found myself muttering, "The semi-colon is your friend," numerous times while reading Dewey. It also doesn't help that nearly all of her attempts at humor fall thunderously flat.
The other thing that irritated me about Dewey was the way that Myron never broke away from special pleading; she never stops apologizing for her love for Dewey or how he brightened some of the staffers' and patrons' lives. I lost count of the number of "He's only a cat" or "How could a cat possibly..."-type qualifiers, and it made me want to scream: if there are any ailurophobes in the house, they are not very likely to be persuaded to become ailurophiles by this lengthy Reader's Digest-style paean to one special, gregarious library cat. For all that farmers damn well ought to appreciate cats as mousers and rat-catchers, if for no other reason, people with such a utilitarian regard for them aren't apt to protest o'ermuch when some persons of low character get their jollies from, say, pitching a cat or two into a bonfire (as the titular character and his college football teammates did in Sinclair Lewis's novel Elmer Gantry). Myron should've confined herself to one or two apologetic, qualifying remarks (if that), and trusted that the cat-lovers and cat-haters would sort themselves out.
And while Myron offers some semi-interesting bits of trivia (I was impressed that a library would have a large collection of cake pans that patrons could check out, and amused that Dewey's two favorite fast food items came from two of the three fast food emporiums that I formerly worked at) and tries mightily to present Iowa in general and Spencer, Iowa in particular as starkly beautiful landscapes peopled by generous, rock-ribbed, salt of the earth folk, she is not entirely successful in concealing the David Lynchian corners of Iowa life (not the least of her ex-husband). I realize that Dewey would've been quite a different book had she toned down the Field of Dreams stuff and spilled more ink on the Blue Velvet-type antics; nonetheless, I'm certain that I'm not the only reader who finds the fact that Iowa was once the state with the highest number of subscriptions to Playboy and the highest number of abortions -- intriguing.
The final, and most damning, indictment of Dewey is the fact that my, er, "allergies" didn't act up once during the account of the close of Dewey's life -- in marked contrast to, say, Peter Gethers's The Cat Who'll Live Forever, the concluding book in his trilogy about his Scottish fold kitty, Norton. If a gooey puff piece about a rescued kitty doesn't make me sniffle at least a little, then said prose is definitely sub-sub-par. But, wait! For those who don't want to read even a fifth-grade-level account of a cute kitty, it's being adapted into a movie starring Meryl Streep! Oh, gag me with a pooper-scooper....
In short, and contra Gethers's blurb on the back of the jacket of Dewey, cat-lovers looking for some decent writing to accompany their cute kitty moments should read his Norton Trilogy, not Dewey.
(My rating of Dewey? On the LibraryThing scale, 2 stars out of 5, because -- well, Dewey. Duh.)