Review: The Meowmorphosis

The Meowmorphosis
by Cook Coleridge

The Meowmorphosis / 978-1594745034

I *like* the Quirk classics; I liked Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I liked Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Having a soft spot for The Metamorphosis, I fully expected to like The Meowmorphosis... and I did! Until the halfway point when suddenly everything went horribly wrong.

The Metamorphosis is a classic tale of a young man who wakes one morning to find that he has changed into a gruesome insect creature. His family, who previously depended on him entirely for their livelihood, react with varying degrees of kindness, revulsion, and hostility to Gregor in his new form. As Gregor spirals into madness and depression, and as his family become more cruel to him, he finally dies to serve them. The novel is incredibly depressing, but a powerful look at family dynamics and how they can change depending on who is the provider and who is the dependent.

The Meowmorphosis starts out great by staying true to the Quirk format: the story is the same, but with a few key differences; namely Gregor is now a kitten instead of a disgusting insect. Cute! And this set-up works incredibly well; I was fully prepared to give the book 5 stars while reading this part. The sadness and depression that Gregor suffers through his transformation juxtaposes nicely with the fluffy kitten material and it's all very delightful.

About halfway through the novel, however, the author completely abandons Kafka's premise and sets off on his own. Gregor escapes the house and joins a cadre of cats on the street, and these cats are impossibly long-winded and pompous. There are pages and pages of text that feel more like filler than anything else, and all I can say when the author criticizes German writing for being ponderous, that people who live in glass houses shouldn't write dull, monotonous filler dialogue. I suppose it's meant to be parody, but sacrificing the reader's enjoyment of the text to make a point seems detrimental to me.

When the novel then starts throwing in references to the original source text by claiming -- and I *think* I have this correctly -- that the "anxious dreams" that all the men-cats had prior to their transformation was a dream of a man turned to a cockroach, I gave up. The people in The Meowmorphosis dream about The Metamorphosis. It's layers upon layers, but since it's all conveyed in huge, deliberately wordy blocks of dialogue, it just couldn't hold my interest.

Two stars for the awesome beginning, which I will treasure. No stars for the massive mood shift halfway that caused me to give up in frustration.

NOTE: This review is based on a free Advance Review Copy of this book provided through Amazon Vine.

~ Ana Mardoll

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