This book is famous in publishing circles for its hefty advance, of $1.25 million. Whether the book will live up to its expectations is anybody’s guess. I read the book and am left none the wiser, although I enjoyed reading it. The cover is a real winner, showing Dewey’s soulful gaze. Dewey is the library cat who was found in the book drop of the Spencer, Iowa town library one freezing January morning. He was adopted by the library, and the rest is history. The director who saved Dewey writes the story (with help from Bret Witter) and chronicles his life at the library along with her own family saga and some information about life in Iowa. When Dewey arrived in 1988 the family farms were in deep trouble, going into foreclosures and being bought up by big conglomerates. The director, Vicki Myron, believes that having Dewey around really helped brighten up people’s days, and it sounds like he did. He was a particularly “people-oriented” kind of cat (unfortunately he’s not still around, but his final resting place can be seen on library grounds), heading for people’s laps regardless of newspapers or books getting in his way. He helped Vicki connect with her teen-aged daughter, and he gave her a warm welcome each cold and dark morning. He was an inside cat, and some of the physical details of his bouts with sickness may not deter the cat-loving reader, but hearing about his finicky diet (offered as many as six different flavors on a given day) was a bit much for me. If this book is going to compete with John Grogan’s book about Marley, you have to swallow that unlike Marley, this is not about a cat in a natural state. But so many cats in this country live indoors, that may pass unnoticed.
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