Our score
Excellent
Kitten
Stacey Yu's debut follows Katie, twenty-two and stalled out after college, into a growing obsession with her boyfriend's childhood cat. Kitten is literary fiction with a deadpan comic surface and a mother-daughter wound underneath, and it is unusually sharp about what it costs to be loved on somebody else's terms.
From the review
Katie is lying on the floor of a seaside house that belongs to her boyfriend's family, at eye level with a cat named Silver, and she has been down there long enough that the light through the window has moved across her arm. Downstairs there is a dinner she is meant to be charming at. She can hear it. Silver rolls over, presents her stomach, declines to explain herself, and is adored anyway. Katie does not get up. That floor is where Kitten lives. Stacey Yu has written a debut about a twenty-two-year-old who watches a cat get fed, praised, and forgiven for simply existing, and concludes, without ever quite deciding to, that this is the correct amount to ask of the world. Katie is fresh out of college, broke, months behind on rent to the roommate who is also her closest friend, and not speaking to her mother. James, the boyfriend, is generous in the way that makes all the decisions for you. He is not a villain. For the novel's purposes he is something more dangerous, which is comfortable, and comfort is what lets Katie stop moving. Yu writes her interiority in a dry, flat register that keeps undercutting how badly things are going.
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