Da Vinci's Cat

This book has only been out for several days and I saw it as a new release at my library. I took a chance on this middle-school level book when I read a few comments about it. It began as a pure delight. Historical fantasy with lots of detail from 1511 Rome with a young boy, Federico, held 'hostage' by the Pope as Raphael and Michelangelo paint the papal quarters and Sistine Chapel. Slightly irreverant and reminiscent of books like 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' with a wardrobe here invented by Leonardo Da Vinci whose cat goes time travelling. The interactions between Federico and others in 1511 were fun.

However when the story jumps to the present this adventure begins to stumble. The puzzle pieces don't quite fit. Just how old show more is the old woman? 110 and something? Where has Juno the time cat been for nearly a century? What first began to bother me was all the machinations trying to create a sense of urgency in the present with delayed trains and phone calls and so on. The charm that was with us at the start was rather suddenly gone although there were some clever moments.

But ... when we return to Rome in 1511 the story picks up again, thankfully, and gets quite exciting when Federico gives chase to Michelangelo, riding Bathsheba, the fastest horse in Rome.

This proved to be a very entertaining book. There are some very nice chapter decorations drawn by Paul Zelinsky as a little bonus. show less

this was an utter slog for the first 75 pages or so. i don't think i've ever said that about a middle grade book before. i actually was going to stop reading for the first time ever and my son said we should give it just a little longer, and that's when it turned around just a bit for me. i thought the time period (1511 rome) was going to be interesting, and obviously she did a ton of research, but it didn't work. the modern time period worked better for me, at first, and then it just was a jumble and a bumble and none of it worked or made much sense. i guess i learned a little about art maybe? we really, really struggled to finish this one.

As a lover of cats and art history, I had high hopes for this story. They were not fulfilled. The author clearly has done an enormous amount of research to get the details of early 16th-century Rome right, and then falls victim to the temptation to write them ALL into every page - every dish at several banquets, every item of clothing worn. The writing is often repetitive: she tells us multiple times in a single scene that Michelangelo stinks. She tells us - over and over - that Federico wants a friend. Paradoxically, there are elements of the art and artists and assumptions that *I* (as an adult art history grad) "got" that I'm not sure the intended middle-grade reader would, or would find terribly appealing. When the setting and show more characters shifted to present-day America, the carpentry just broke down and I bailed.

Clumsy writing, tenuous plot machinery, and charmless characters... just didn't work for me. show less

Two unlikely friends—Federico, in sixteenth-century Rome, and Bee, in present-day New Jersey—are linked through an amiable cat, Leonardo Da Vinci’s mysterious wardrobe, and an eerily perfect sketch of Bee. Newbery Honor author Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Da Vinci’s Cat is a thrilling, time-slip fantasy about rewriting history to save the present. This inventive novel will engross anyone who loved When You Reach Me and A Wrinkle in Time.

A cute little book about time travel and famous artists