Title: Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
Author: Vicki Myron with Bret Witter
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 3 out of 5
From the inside flap:
How much of an impact can an animal have? How many lives can one cat touch? How is it possible for an abandoned kitten to transform a small library, save a classic American town, and eventually become famous around the world? You can’t even begin to answer these questions until you hear the charming story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa.
Dewey’s story starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the returned book slot at the Spencer Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of them in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with his enthusiasm, warmth, humility (for a cat), and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most.
As his fame grew from town to town, then state to state, and finally, amazingly, worldwide, Dewey became more than just a friend; he became a source of pride for an extraordinary Heartland farming town pulling it way slowly back from the greatest crisis in its long history.
I know I’m late to jump on the Dewey bandwagon, but I simply never had the chance to read it before now. And I’m glad I did.
I loved reading about this amazing kitten who serendipitously landed at the Spencer Public Library for a long, full life, enriching the lives of those around him to such an amazing extent! I absolutely adored all the descriptions of his displays of love and affection, as well as his idiosyncracies. I most admit, I am more a dog person than a cat person, but I am most certainly not adverse to cats! That being said, reading this book did help the cat cause in my heart.
On the other hand, however, you may have noticed that I only gave this book a middling rating. That is because I thought the book spent far too much time talking about the town of Spencer and the biography of Vicki Myron, the library director who found Dewey and who wrote the book. I can understand why they included these personal histories, with the intention of showing how much Dewey meant to the town and to Vicki, but I feel like they could have done a much better job of making the connection to Dewey clearer. This is supposed to be a book about Dewey, and yet chapters would go by with nary a mention of him! I think that if they had made the ties between the stories they told about Spencer and Vicki and Dewey, the book would have been much stronger.
I will admit, however, that by the end of Dewey, I was sobbing. Though the fact that I finished it at 2 a.m. didn’t help that!
All in all, it is a wonderful read, but not one that I want to add to my personal collection or read again.
