Kathryn's Reviews > Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Cat's Life: 101 Stories about All the Ages and Stages of Our Feline Family Members

Generally I avoid Chicken Soup books like the plague, as books purposefully written to be heartwarming are normally not anything I would want to read. (Once I counted all the Chicken Soup books at Barnes & Noble, and came up with about 35 titles, not including Chicken Soup for the Soul of Harry Potter’s Podiatrist.) However, my sister read this book and gave it to me, and told me to read it, so I have; and I found it surprisingly readable (and heartwarming), since I am a confirmed cat person from way back. (We currently technically have six cats, but two of them have also be adopted by neighbors, leaving us with four core cats and a few other cats who come by to eat now and again.)

The book’s stories, none longer than a couple of pages, are written by 101 different authors; each story is prefaced by a famous author quote about cats, and scattered through the book are cat-related Off the Mark cartoons by Mark Parisi. The stories in the beginning have to do with kittens, mostly, with the stories in the middle having to do with teenage and established settled cats. This means that the stories at the end of this collection have to do with cats making that journey over the Rainbow Bridge, which can be a tad depressing.

One hears over and over in the stories of people who had no intention of getting a cat ending up with one, either because they picked up a cat at the shelter or because the cat adopted them by simply showing up at the back door. Cats purr, scratch, leave dead mice for their owners, get spayed / neutered, and in general creep into the hearts of their people. Again and again, cats which seemed aloof become caring when one of their persons or another cat is ill or in need of solace.

This would be a wonderful book for a cat lover; the stories are indeed heartwarming (yes, I know I used that word three times, but this is a Chicken Soup book), and make a cat lover want to go out and adopt more cats (or be adopted by more cats).