This is definitely out of my comfort zone; for me, it was a weird story. It's told by a cat.  The cat had a wonderful life; a happy warm lap, the best treats, quiet time with her owner, the Moustache.  It just didn't get any better than that. 

One day, Moustache had to leave town and left the cat in the care of a young boy; a neighbor who saw to her regularly.  But this time, the boy did something unusual: he put her into a carrier.  He then handed her off to a man in a trenchcoat who then sold her to a school.  From here it got spectacularly weird.

This world has gotten spectacularly weird and we only see snippets through the cat's eyes.  Everyone has put feelings above all other priorities.  And there are now schools who teach people how to be more in touch with their feelings than others.  And they issue Certificates certifying this.  But to get this much-desired Certificate, they must complete a course of instruction that includes spending several days in the company of a closed box.  And it is in this box that our cat protagonist now resides.  But the box is completely closed and the cat has no water or food.  But the students don't know this for sure.  They are told there is a cat in the box…maybe.  And they are to examine how they feel about it.

So our cat has some definite feelings about this.  But after a few days, she realizes her existence has changed.  She still feels herself a cat but she looks quite different and she is no longer confined in the box.  She determines that she will figure out who is responsible for ruining her life; quite literally.  But she didn't count on Moustache's life being equally ruined.

I've read books before that were told by a cat; the authors tended to try and give a non-human feel to the story, not so this one.  This cat thinks and speaks just like a human; and while one could imagine her knowledge and speech patterns came from the TV, she just doesn't feel like a cat.  From there it becomes something of a ghost story as the cat follows several people who were involved in her cat-napping, determined to get her revenge.  But everything changes for her when she finds out what happened to Moustache.

The worldbuilding is almost non-existent.  We get a few glimpses of a very strange world but no explanation.  The reader isn't expected to care about what's 'outside' the story which makes reading it very easy and fast.  I read this in a day. The only real question I still have is why it was necessary to put a cat in the box at all.  No one ever saw or heard it.  The students took it on faith that it was in there.  There was no explanation why that was necessary to their instruction or testing.

And that's all that can be said as a summary because, at the end of the day, this book was one long poem.  Yes, it was written by a professional poet so it wasn't a great leap of understanding.  But it did help ground me so I knew what he intended.  I don't 'get' poetry so I might be mistaken…I think the story was simply there to define 'love.'  It is definitely designed to make the reader think about it.  ~  Catherine Book