Mary's Reviews > She and Her Cat: Stories

4.5/5

Time for another edition of Bookstagram Made Me Do It folks, and this time it comes in the form of She and Her Cat: Stories by Makoto Shinkai (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori). Apparently, this was a short film by Shinkai before it was a book, and if it was this good as a book, I could see it being completely adorable as a film. I would guess there are some things that maybe I missed since it is translated from Japanese, but the overall themes of the stories seemed fairly easy to understand. I don't know that I felt FULLY connected to any of the characters but there was enough there that I could find relatable things about each one, and I thought the translation came through just fine thanks to Tapley Takemori.

It was a lovely thing to have all 4 stories be interconnected, and I had to look up the definition of vignette since I thought they might be the same thing as a short story. Turns out they are not the same, but for this book, I thought they basically had the same concept although returning characters and cats in each one meant this kind of felt like one long story. The audiobook for She and Her Cat was really good as well, and I loved that there were 5 different narrators. Winson Ting, Julia Strowski, Jacqui Bardelang, Hana Teraie-Wood & Nile Faure-Bryan all brought a great authenticity to the characters (and I guess the cats for that matter), and I would gladly recommend the audio to anyone. It was interesting to see how the audio varied to the actual book, and some of the verbiage was a touch different but only in terms of making it more American. If you are a pet lover, especially cats, I think it will be very easy to find something to love about She and Her Cat.