3 out of 4 stars
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Diary of a Snoopy Cat is a thrilling "first-person" account of Inca, a Siberian Kitty, on her quest to become a great cat detective. Inca lives with her family, which consists of Cara, an arrogant Siamese cat; Fromage, a cheese-loving tabby cat; Charlotte, a hamster; and their human Mom, Missy. The family has recently moved from Paris to London, where they've made new friends such as Monk, the Blue Russian cat; Polo, the Pekingese; and Terrence, a Golden Retriever detective that is idolized by Inca. But, when Terrence embarks on a trip to the Himalayas to solve his own case, Inca is left alone when an intimidating, cat-hating Rottweiler named Boss comes seeking help finding a missing will. It is Inca's time to shine, but does she have what it takes?
One thing I liked about this book was the fact that it was clearly written from the point of view of a cat. Inca describes her owner as being a humanoid that is jointly owned by her, Cara, Fromage, and Charlotte. Inca even mentions that they let Missy think she owns them, but in reality it is the other way around. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows this to be true. R. F. Kristi is clearly an animal lover, and I love the fact that she uses some of the proceeds from the Inca series to help animals. I also thought it was interesting to find out that Inca and Cara are actually based on the author's two cats. It's no wonder the characters seem to come alive.
The book takes place during Christmas and is organized in two ways. First, it is organized by day in relation to how many days are left until Christmas. Then, it is divided into smaller portions based on time of day (morning, afternoon, evening). I was not a huge fan of the font used, but maybe children will enjoy it more. It doesn't quite look like handwriting, but it is stylized enough that it helps add to the idea that this is a diary. I wish it looked a bit more like handwriting to make it a little more realistic. I did, however, love the illustrations. The drawings conveyed the personality of the characters perfectly and were charming. Story-wise, Diary of a Snoopy Cat is definitely a page turner. Despite being a children's book, it did not seem predictable. There was a lot of suspense and conflict wasn't resolved too easily.
Overall, I give this book a 3 out of 4 stars. This book does have several punctuation errors. There were a lot of sentences that were missing commas and some that had missing quotation marks. In some cases, improper punctuation was used as a stylistic choice ("Whereas, Fromage is??? Well, Fromage is Fromage.") but there were other instances that didn't seem to be intentional. If it weren't for these errors, I would have rated the book a 3.5 because there was, in my opinion, too much going on. The book does a great job introducing the main characters (Inca's family) in the beginning, which I appreciated. However, there was an entire side story that went on with another group of characters (Solo, Terrence, etc) that I had a hard time keeping track of and there were a large amount of characters that were only mentioned briefly. I had to stop reading and go back to reread some parts because I got confused. I also found that the ending of the book seemed to drag on and the story itself was a bit slow to start. There was also a lot of random bits that didn't seem to contribute much to the overall story, but this is intended to be a diary written by a cat so perhaps it's fitting. Despite all this, I did thoroughly enjoy reading the book and am in love with Inca and Co.
I will be reading more books from this series and would love to see them turned into movies or a television series. Inca and her animal friends are sure to steal the heart of readers, while their adventures will keep the audience at the edge of their seat waiting to see what comes next. I'd highly recommend this book to children and any animal lover.
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Diary of a Snoopy Cat
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