(13) 2 am at the Cat’s Pajamas // Bookish Blurb

2am at the Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino

The basic premise of the book is that nine year old Madeleine want to sing at the Cat’s Pajamas which is a Philadelphia jazz club. I really wanted to like Madeleine, I really really wanted to but I just had a hard time doing so. I can appreciate her talents and that her life has been really hard and unfair but seriously, she acts like a rebellious 15 yr old.

Some of the other key characters include Sarina, Madeleine’s lonely teacher who is in love with a married man, and Lorca, the owner of the Cat’s Pajamas.

This was another book on that list of happy books and I’m kind of puzzled by that since it’s really not that much of a happy book.

This book covers roughly 24 hrs and manages to pack lots of stuff into that time frame. Also there are many many characters (some of whom we only read about for a couple of pages) all of which seem complex. All of the characters in this book seem broken or maybe it’s just that they are more realistic and complex. Either way, not exactly a happy book.

 

While this book was fast paced, amusing, and definitely interesting, it was ultimately a disappointment for me. I think part of that might have been all the adult content involved in the book (even from the 9 yr old…) or the fact that it was so realistic and ultimately rather inconclusive. Also the ending was super weird to me. Maybe I was in a rush but I got super confused at the very end. Everything else was at least semi-logical and then some totally impossible happens…

Overall an interesting book with some very solid characters (this is definitely more of a character driven book rather than plot driven but there are so many characters that the plot never felt slow) but like I said earlier, I found it kind of a disappointment.

2 am at the Cat’s Pajamas on Amazon

#13 of 2017

What happened to 13? Technically book 13 was Gateway to Faerie by M.D. Bowden which I  downloaded for free onto my kindle ages ago and read recently on the bus to and from school for spring break. It’s really not worth talking about, that’s how mediocre it was. I only put it here to claim that I read another book.