Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Marty Becker, Carol Kline and Amy Shojai

I'm a cat person.  I currently have two of my own and could only wish for more.  So, on this streak of Chicken Soup books that I've been reading lately, it only seemed appropriate to read the Cat Lover's Soul book.

Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul is filled with the normal short stories of the Chicken Soup series.  They are broken down into different chapters titled, "On Love", "Celebrating the Bond", "A Furry RX", "Cat-Egorically Wonderful", "Cats as Teachers", "Farewell, My Love", "Rescue Me!", and "One of the Family."  Each of these chapters has several short stories relating to the themes and of course, they are all about cats.  There are stories of adopting special cats, cats alerting their owners to danger or illness, and many other things.  I especially liked the story "The Call of the Lobster" about a cat who talks to a special toy, because one of my mom's cats does the same thing with a fuzzy ball she carries around.  I knew she was strange, but at least she's not alone in her strangeness.  There were other stories I didn't like though, like the one about a lady who rescued a cat with FIV and then after treating it at the vet let it roam with her other cats (yes FIV can be contained and treated, but it can be infectious and it seemed an unnecessary risk to her other cats).

I'm of the opinion that all cats are pretty wonderful.  It's the owners that I sometimes don't care for.  There are a lot of people out there that are just cruel to animals (including a story in this book where four teenage boys are practicing target shooting on a cat) and it hurts to read about people like that.  Granted, there are just as many if not more wonderful people in this book who adopt cats and take care of them, so it does have that redeeming quality to it.  But really, it's the cats that make this book worthwhile and it showcases them.

I will admit that there were quite a few stories in here that made me laugh or cry.  The cat getting its head stuck in the garbage disposer (it was rescued successfully) made me giggle.  But, despite there being a specific chapter for cat death "Farewell, My Love", kitty death was rampant through this book.  I'm fairly convinced that the people at Chicken Soup aren't happy unless there's a death of a person, animal, plant, whatever, every ten pages or so in their books.  Not sure what's so inspiring about that, but they've sold a lot of books so it much be working.  I just wish there was more life than death in these books, especially this one since I appreciate my kitties being alive and don't want to think about their eventual deaths right now.  Still, they had a lot of good stories in this book.

Overall this is one of the better Chicken Soup books.  As a cat lover, I did enjoy it and read it in one sitting.

Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul
Copyright 2005
378 pages