Nine Lives of Montezuma by Michael Morpurgo
August 3rd 2010 21:00
I spent the past couple of days thinking about this book (this is the one where a boy’s father drowns the farm cat’s kittens) HERE. I couldn’t get the story out of my head and wanted to know what happened. In the end I thought, stuff it, it’s a slim volume so it’s not going to take up much room in my ever-growing library. I went back to the bookstore in search of it.
At first, I thought it had been sold; all of the other books by the same author seemed to be there but not this particular title. But being such a slim book, it had simply been tucked away amongst his prolific offerings and pushed right against the wall. I picked it up in relief and paid for it.
At first glance, I was struck by the author’s dry and unsentimental writing style. It was a matter-of-fact which is something I tend to avoid, being scared off by after being forced to read Hemingway and Steinbeck at school. But I had to know what happened to the farm cat. In the end, the father missed drowning one of her kittens and the plot centres on the cycle of the kitten’s life – and the many scrapes he manages to get into, only to be rescued by the boy. Although the father never seems to change his attitude towards felines, he does become fond of little Montezuma.
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