Spencer White

8/23/20

Hello Ms. Gibson,

The Traveling Cat Chronicles

Hiro Arikawa

Page 1-71

 

The first section of the book consists of how the main character, who is a cat named Nana, meets one of the supporting characters Kosuke, who owns a white van which is featured on the art of the book. Kosuke meets the cat when he was walking to his van, where Nana was sitting, after that a few days later and Nana gets hit by a passing car and Kosuke nurses him back to health. A few years after Kosuke takes in Nana he tells his friend Saturo that he wishes to give him Nana, as Kosuke can no longer care for him. The rest of the section consists of Kosuke talking about the previous cats he owned.

 

One of my favorite parts of this book happens to be the cover art, that depicts the main cat’s defining features and the white van, which Kosuke owns. However, I dislike how the author depicts how the cats in this book “speak”. Instead of using quotes to discern when a cat is talking, the sentence is written without them, displaying the cat’s train of thought with no way to distinguish it from what is the cat’s dialogue and what is a normal sentence. A way to fix this would be to use quotation marks or highlight the cat’s thoughts with italics. This is important because it makes it difficult to tell whether a paragraph is what a cat is saying or if it’s an expository sentence. Despite this, I still like how new chapters are presented, with a new piece of artwork featuring characters from the story each chapter.