Review: Cat Dragon

Cat Dragon by Samantha Birch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cozy doesn't need to mean low stakes, and this is an, at times, extremely tense story of a witch who has never quite fitted in, doing her best with her companions to stave off disaster from her home. Cute familiars and other animal companions, a loyal best friend, a love interest with reluctance because reasons, a chance-met apparent-ally-but-can-we-trust-her, and a couple of other chance-met associates round out the main cast, and were easy to keep straight, though none of them developed great depth.

Worldbuilding is not a strength of the cozy genre, sadly, but this book at least has the third-lowest-effort approach to it. The lowest-effort approach is to take the author's familiar surroundings and change a few names of things and say there's magic, without it ever impacting anything even slightly. The second-lowest-effort approach is to take the author's culture and beliefs and place them in front of some generic sword & sorcery scenery flats, which is what most cozy books do. The third-lowest-effort approach, used here, is to take whole cultures and languages from our world and just import them into the secondary world with a vaguely new geography. Latin exists, for example, and is the language used for scientific naming; photography and the wireless are mentioned, but never seen, and the world feels like the usual generic fantasy world that's vaguely at a late-medieval/early-renaissance tech level, except where it isn't.

I read it on my Kobo from the library, so I'll have to mention the specifics of the copy editing here rather than linking to Kindle notes and highlights. It's mostly good, but there are enough minor glitches that it didn't get my "well-edited" tag. There are a couple of vocab issues ("alike" for "like", "foreman" for "footman" - clearly a mistyping - and the overcorrection of "laid" to "lay"), a few missing or mistyped words ("on top everything else," "precious else left," "had been a kind a", "coming into land" where it should be "in to" - the "to" is not a preposition but part of the verb), the use of "may" instead of "might" in the past tense sometimes (but not often), the occasional dangling modifier, and of course a lot of commas between adjectives which don't need them - it's almost more common for authors to make that mistake than to not make it. It's better than average.

Like other reviewers, I did feel confused about what was happening at a few points. The author, I'm sure, had a clear idea in her head about what the events meant and how the viewpoint character understood them, but she sometimes needed to get more of it on the page for the reader to share in that understanding.

All of those minor flaws aside - and they were minor - I enjoyed it, it had a genuinely cozy feel while still being about something happening, the main character was a believable mix of self-doubt and competence, and I will happily read the sequel once it's available.

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