From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Subtitled, "The Little Cat with Big Ideas." this book was well-illustrated and in color, and the stories I read were amusing, but why it was issued in a Kindle format is utterly beyond me. I've said it repeatedly: unless your text is plain vanilla (with not even dropcaps!), then nine times out of ten, or worse, Amazon's crappy Kindle coversion process will turn your book into kindling - especially if it has images. This one was totally mangled with text and images out of place and mismatched. In other formats the book was considerably better, but even then there was a problem.
The book had almost seventy stories and they're collected into groups by the four seasons, but my copy had only ten stories from 'the spring collection'. The rest of the stories were missing even though they were listed in the content list. And there was no way to tap from the content list to any of the stories, nor was there any way to get back to the contents by, say, tapping on the story title, so this was a serious problem. One reason I'm quitting reviewing books at the end of this year is because of this shabby treatment of reviewers by publishers and Net Galley. I don't expect to get a nice pristine print copy to review by any means, but I do expect to be treated decently, and reviewers deserve better than this.
Since this was an ARC, I checked back on the Net Galley website to see if I'd been sent a sample only, and there was nothing there to indicate any such thing, so I can only assume something got monumentally cocked-up along the way. Anyway this review is of only those ten stories, all of which are about animals and Boris's interaction with them. This is the kind of story where nearly all of the animals walk around on two legs and are all the same size, regardless of species! There are no speech balloons, just descriptive text and equally descriptive and amusing imagery, and each story consists of six such images. Why that is, I do not know!
That said, the stories were amusing to me. I'm not sure why Boris is credited so much with big ideas, but the ones we saw, from a variety of sources, were inventive in a Heath Robinson sort of a way, and were in fact reminiscent of the Mr Bean TV show, so if you've seen that and enjoyed it, you may well find this amusing. I loved the absurdist and off-the-wall humor. These were wacky enough to make me chuckle, so on that basis, and keeping in mind that I was able to read barely more than 10% of this book, I commend it as a worthy read.
