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A Year Of Cats And Dogs (2009)

by Margaret Hawkins(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1579621899 (ISBN13: 9781579621896)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Permanent Press (NY)

review 1: At 49 Maryanne Draper feels she has “earned the right to let things go” and decides it is her turn to be “irresponsible.” Her live-in boyfriend of 10 years has departed, her job is more than tiresome, and she has savings to support herself, so she opts to “let things fall apart, just to see what would happen.” I guess you call this a mid-life crisis.Helped along by the wisdom of the I Ching, which encourages her to “wait” and to “deepen the stillness within,” and by the calming behaviors of her pet dog and cat, Maryanne finds her new and unambitious life to be comfortable and comforting. She avoids most of her friends and neighbors, however, because they demand to know what she’s up to and she can’t answer to their satisfaction. They unhelpfully off... moreer suggestions like getting pregnant (!) and following her passion.“A Year of Cats and Dogs” follows Maryanne as she allows life to just be and at the same time questions whether that’s really a good strategy. The “allowing” results in her discovery that she can communicate with animals, after which she finds two part-time jobs that suit her far better than her previous career writing smarmy verse for a collectibles company. But as Maryanne ventures out more, she must face the fact that most people take a more pro-active approach to life. They don’t really endorse her musing that “life doesn’t seem to have a plot.” I’m sympathetic to her dilemma. The Taoist philosophy is appealing, and I personally would prefer to accept than to fight (ideally, that is). But whether Maryanne comes to any terms with this conundrum is questionable. So while I enjoyed many aspects of this novel -- the animals’ wisdom about life and death perhaps above all -- I didn’t know if Maryanne herself had grown at all as a result of her various serendipitous experiences.I should add that using the I Ching as a framework for the chapters didn’t really work for me. Maybe it was just too much work to try to correlate the headings with the content of the chapters -- especially since there were 64 of them in just over 200 pages. Adding recipes throughout the narrative also seemed a distraction. Or maybe I just wasn’t accepting enough?
review 2: Actually, there was only one cat ... And (to talk about the less effective things first), the chapter headings from the I Ching were annoying, as were the recipes--kind of gimmicky and distracting. At the end, I wished that Maryanne had found her groove, that her life had found a story and she opened her heart to a new human love, but the narrator's voice remained the same. However, it was a good, satisfying book in many ways because it addressed head-on and didn't trivialize some of the big questions of middle age: the value of, love, and friendship; end of life relationships with elderly parents whose lives are more of a mystery to us than we assume; the meaning of work and the recurring fact of funerals and how families process death. And the importance of pets as the stable, loving continuity in our lives. The fact that Maryanne could communicate with pets -- not in an overdone or sentimental way -- added greater dimension to the human stories. In the end I closed the book liking the characters, except for Phillip, of course. less

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