Review: A cute little fairy tale
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 7, 2014
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 7/10PROS:- This is an original idea for a story. I haven’t read anything else quite like it.- The story is short, but Martinez manages to pack quite a bit of hurt/comfort punch into it without any truly hard-hitting angst. The sad passages are brief and are followed quickly by sweet ones.- There are some amusing moments, particularly when Kasha works magic in his feline form and people can’t fathom that he’s the one who did it because they see him as nothing more than an ordinary cat. Also, the variety of ways in which his magic manifests itself is clever. I certainly wasn’t bored.CONS:- I’m not sure the mix of feline and human in Kasha quite worked for me, at least not to the extremes they’re taken here. He is a typical cat--one minute, for instance, he’s “batt[ing] at his shoelace, then captur[ing] it to chew on the end,” and the very next he’s spouting off rather intelligent dialogue (“So the purpose of this outpouring of funds would have been to create, to become an artist”) that seems at odds with the playful, feline nature of his actions a moment before.- The fantasy language gives the story a bit of an historical feel, but now and then the mention of something modern, like a telephone or an Antonio Banderas movie, is thrown in, and that always jolted me right out of the story.Overall comments: I found Kasha sort of amusing and sort of irritating. I couldn’t figure out which feature overpowered the other, and even now I’m not sure whether I mostly liked or disliked him. However, I definitely liked the story overall. It’s brief but clever.