Review: A typical tale of boy meets girl’s…cat.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 7, 2014
Girl with the Cat Tattoo is your typical tale of boy meets girl’s…cat.Meet Max.“A cat, especially a cat like him, had to retain an outward appearance of cool at times.”Max is not your typical cat. He’s what you would describe as a Kitler. He’s also very smart and actually knows what’s going on around him. Max lives with Melody, who showers him with love and affection but he does not approve of her choices in men. Because he loves Melody and wants her to be happy, he decided that it’s his job to bring home a proper mate for her (who would also shower him with love and affection, of course).The only time I read a cat’s POV is from a chapter of Alice Clayton’s Wallbanger. It was funny but it was also brief. I thought it would be the same with this book, that Max’s POV will only be in a couple of special chapters and then we move on to the main characters but I was wrong. Max is one of the main characters. Honestly, if I knew that almost half of this book is going to be told through Max’s POV, I would probably pass on it because romance told by a cat? Kind of weird.But I was wrong…again.Max definitely had character. It’s like the world being told from a slightly vain,“It was a great picture of him. A wonderful picture of him. Melody liked to take photos of him acting silly, Photos when his eyes were wild and he’d been doing a little too much catnip. But this was sweet. And wow did his eyes ever look yellow. What a handsome cat he was.”somewhat wussy cat,“Confession time. He actually liked it better than a real mouse. Once he’d seen a real mouse in the basement. It squeaked and jumped out from behind a broom. Max ran like hell, and for quite some time he avoided that area.”with a bit of a god-like complex.“Max thought about the string of losers that had come and gone until he’d brought Joe home. Which just went to prove that humans didn’t always know what was best for them. Sometimes they needed their cats to give them guidance.”His POV was both hilarious and adorable! His matchmaking antics and outlook on life and love just made a storyline that has been told time and again to become completely original because if you leave Max out of this story, this book will really just be a typical tale of widow meets undercover cop and there’s definitely countless books about that.But aside from Max, I also appreciate that Joe is not your typical cop romance hero. For one thing, he’s not described as a panty-dropping beautiful playboy. You know, the type who has women fawning over him. For another, he has a more Beta personality than Alpha and that was just damn refreshing. As much I like demanding, broody Alpha males in romance books, they are a dime a dozen in this genre. No, Joe is a regular guy who just happens to be a cop. His character is realistic and he is really someone you would want to be with in real life.A quirky cat deserves a quirky mistress and Melody is definitely that. I love how she is unapologetic about her quirkiness and she doesn’t care that others may think her as odd.“The man was giving her that look. A look she was used to seeing. Yes, she was wearing the Pippi Longstocking costume she wore for story hour, but even when she was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, people sometimes gave her that look. A person had to be what a person had to be. And maybe she’d gotten odder since David’s death.”She is also unapologetic and quite public and vocal about her love for her cat and to tell you frankly, she really is a bit weird. I found it odd how much her life revolved around her cat. She’s like a cat lady in the making.“People used to say Melody led a charmed life. Once she’d even found the end of a rainbow. It was the oddest thing, because there was nothing there. Nothing. Just a field. She’d never told anybody about it, not anybody but Max. She told Max a lot of things she didn’t tell anyone else. He didn’t understand, but she loved that she could tell him anything and he seemed to listen."Max saved Melody from her cat-lady fate of course because he brought her and Joe together, although there were quite a few bumps along the way. As this is a book with a cop for a hero, then it’s expected that there’s also a bit of mystery and intrigue along with the romance. I like how a seemingly light book can be so seamless with its darker elements. This book dealt with crime, death and murder but it still retained that same easy vibe that it had when I first started it.And as much as I like reading smutty romance books, I’m getting pretty bored with the sex scenes. Nowadays,  unless if there’s plot changing dialogue in these scenes, I tend to skim them. It was actually refreshing to read a book that focused on other things beside the hero and heroine’s uncontrollable lust for one another. This book was the perfect example that you don’t need sex scenes just to make the romance interesting because there are other things that you can focus on. Like the actual relationship between the characters and how they (including Max) set out in finding a compromise so that they can all be together.Told from the POV of three very likable main characters that I absolutely rooted for, I had so much fun reading this book. I was looking for something light, easy and uncomplicated and this book was all that plus it was also very original, and again, that is mainly because of its characters. I highly recommend Girl with the Cat Tattoo if you are looking for a smut-free, clean adult romance with quirk and a certain flair.