I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.
Agnes Aubert has no time for the destructive shenanigans magicians are up to in Montreal. Winter is closing in, her shelter’s roof is ruined by irresponsible magic fights, and she and her rescue cats are having a hell of a time finding a new space to rent. Unfortunately, much of the city considers cats to be pests at best, vermin at worst, and Agnes’s funds are thin. And that’s how Agnes ends up renting a former bakery in a far nicer part of town than she should be able to afford, from a strange man who suspiciously is only the agent for the owner, and things just get weirder from there. Still, Agnes is able to ignore the odd happenings in her new shelter space in favor of a safe, warm place to expand her cat shelter, a dream she and her late husband shared that she is determined to continue, even if her suspicions about the building’s connection to a magician turn out to be true and get her in far more trouble than she ever anticipated.
Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter is a hilariously genius piece of storytelling by Heather Fawcett, author of the Emily Wilde series (which I also adored). Fawcett gives us a well-developed world that’s vaguely Victorian or turn of the century without strictly defining it as either, so it’s both familiar and “other” enough to be fantastical. Magicians wreaking havoc with interdimensional magic that clearly has rules, but the setting, backstory, and rules are sprinkled throughout the narrative in ways that bring the reader into Agnes’s life like we’re meant to be there and know what’s going on: it never feels like we’re getting a dump of information that would distract from the story itself. The characters, including the cats themselves, are wonderfully unpredictable, flawed, funny, and real.
I laughed out loud more than once reading this book. Fawcett’s phrasing and writing style has fast pace and quick-witted banter without being mean, which is so refreshingly fun to read the whole book was just a pleasure from start to finish. Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter brought hours of respite in a dark period of real life, and I’ll always be grateful to Heather Fawcett for that. This is a book I’m buying as soon as it’s out for my library, and I can’t wait for the sequel I hope is coming. Read this one!
No Pithy Phrase 