I found this to be a highly amusing book, in a sense a kind of "cozy fantasy" novel. ( )

A very good story, seriously marred by lack of editing (at least in my copy, bought shortly after it was released on Smashwords). It's a more-or-less standard urban fantasy (well...is there such a thing as rural fantasy? It's mostly set in/near a national park), with a Guardian, a crisis, a human ally and many animal ones. Kat is neat, though her inferiority complex gets a little boring before she sucks it up and gets to work; David/Adrian is also an interesting guy, though we don't get to know him as well. It's written purely from Kat's viewpoint. Cato, Shakespeare, and Gaylord are fun too - and Shakespeare's comment at the end (the only one that isn't a quote) got a laugh from me. Interesting magic structure, Fae society and ecosphere, and hints of more - the dragons, for instance. I enjoyed the story very much, but I kept being thrown out of it by typos, homonyms, missing or repeated words... I do freelance editing for Zette (started after I bought this book) - I'm going to ask her if I can edit this one. ( )

Kat Among the Pigeons is a whimsical tale of a Fae who knows her limitations and enjoys her simple life in an unimportant corner of the world where she maintains the border between Fae and the human world. She can talk only to birds and cats, a limitation no other Fae seems to share, and her inner pool of magic is quite small. However, when one thing after another goes wrong and the Fae world is too busy with events they think are more important, Kat figures out how to solve each and every problem with the help of her allies, both cats and birds of all shapes and sizes, and one lone human who gets thrust into magic against his will, but embraces it…along with Kat.

Now by that description, it might sound like the current trend in urban fantasy, but remember the word “whimsical.”

Is the world threatened by a disaster well beyond what the other Fae imagine she’s dealing with? Is she fending off magical creatures both large and small that are supposedly well beyond her ability?

Yes.

It’s more how she’s doing it and how she remains blind to her own skills because of a lifetime of being patted on the shoulder as consolation for her limits that carries the story. She tries to put her life on hold, and that doesn’t work out so well. Kat doesn’t trust herself and comes up with explanations that, while plausible, are not the true ones.

Though at times Kat’s blindness seemed a little too strong, it fits with her character. She’s extremely clever, but only when pressed with her back to the wall. Kat downgrades her abilities and fails to recognize how skilled she has grown with avoiding the clash of technology and magic. She can see her cousin’s sloppy waste of magic, but not how much she has accomplished with fewer resources.

Blend that in with funny moments of Kat trying to keep David, the man she’s interested in, from discovering just what she’s able to do, and a hilarious byplay on a recorded tape between two birds that the humans cannot understand, but Kat can, and you have a fun read. It might not race from crisis to crisis, nor solve world hunger, but Kat Among the Pigeons gave me a good number of enjoyable hours. ( )