Cat Dragon

I sawSamantha Birch's  Cat Dragon when I was wandering around Chapters (sorry, it's now Indigo). It looked super cute, and sounded like a fun cozy fantasy, which was exactly what I wanted to be reading, so I decided to give it a try.

Cat Dragon is the story of Aloysia Papplewick, a magicobotanist witch who lives in Tangleroot Valley. Aloysia has never been able to bond with a cat dragon, the one animal who makes witches' magic more communal, and so has been doing her own thing on her farm. But when the valley's magical guardian sickens and the valley's Council blames her (and honestly, Aloysia blames herself as well), Aloysia sets off on an adventure with her best friend's brother, Hollis, and the cat dragon kitten she found to try to gather three magical ingredients needed to craft a potion to hopefully heal the guardian.

While this is the basic plot of the book, it's not at all what I expected from reading the synopsis. I was expecting a lot more of Aloysia at her home, dealing with the prattling pumpkin patch (that was an interesting bit of worldbuilding - some witches decided to save their soul in a soul seed rather than passing on when they died. So each year they would regrow as a pumpkin, which Aloysia then carved their faces so they could talk. Admittedly strange, but an interesting part of the world because the pumpkins who were related to Aloysia kept commenting on and trying to interfere with her life). But the trouble with the guardian happened pretty quickly, and then Hollis and Aloysia went wandering around from place to place looking for ingredients (I didn't feel like they were "whisked off to a mysterious mountain" - they deliberately went to another country (there was a border crossing) and several different towns and cities). Then after they got the ingredients and put the spell together, it didn't work, so they (unexpectedly) had to go have a magical standoff against magical plants in an ancient tower. Again, not what I was expecting to be reading, and a little all over the place. But interesting nonetheless. Birch created a very neat world of witches and their familiars and it was fun seeing different parts of it.

Some of the characters Aloysia and Hollis befriended along the way were quite interesting, too. Lan was probably my favourite: she was a blind basically treasure-hunter who used her cat dragon, among other things, to lead her around like a seeing eye dog.  She's smart and fun, and definitely (in my opinion) the best character of the book. Another character I really liked was Crow. He was funny and I wished he was in the book a bit more (being a crow, he kept being sent back to Tangleroot to bring the ingredients the party found).

Aloysia was, honestly, a bit annoying to be following. She blamed herself for everything, even when things weren't her fault. And through most of the book I never felt like she was growing or changing - she kept doing her thing (which she was good at) and blaming herself when things weren't working.  

I also have to say: the book's name is a bit weird in context of the story. Yes, Aloysia does find a cat dragon, Littlewick. Yes, he is there with her for most of the adventure. But the story was never really about Littlewick, or his bond with Aloysia. Littlewick was more a part of the setting, giving it some flavour. But the title could have very easily been something more fitting than "Cat Dragon."

So while I found Cat Dragon interesting, I will admit that I struggled with reading it at times. It has some really neat ideas in it, and some great characters. But it wasn't what I expected, and I was sad that I didn't get what I had been hoping for.