The Cat
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Single mother Elise is completely devoted to her eleven-year-old son. He is her world. But that world is violently and cruelly destroyed in a single, terrifying moment when he is killed in a car accident just outside their home. Suddenly alone in her house, surrounded by suffocating memories, Elise faces a future that feels unspeakably bleak and colourless-and pointless. All Elise can think of is joining her son. But in her final, unspoken promise to him, she realizes she must stay alive until she finds someone to take care of his beloved cat, Persephone. As her unique relationship with this trusting creature grows, Elise is forced to confront her past and find the courage to move forward with her life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ravel (The Last Rain) delivers a heartbreaking novel that centers on Elsie, a single-mother paralyzed by grief after her 11-year-old son dies. While her life once revolved around her son, after his death she finds herself struggling to survive on "this alien planet... planet without my son." Ravel's measured prose spares us no detail of Elsie's despair and hopelessness, exposing the confusion, anger and disbelief that come with loss. It's her cat Pursie who forces her to carry on. Although she feels "shipwrecked" in her isolation, refusing to leave the house and rejecting all who reach out to her, Elsie rises each day only to care for the cat her son loved. Her loss forces her to confront the abandonment she's faced in the past from her withholding mother, a former lover, and the father of her son. As her commitment to solitude begins to wane, Elsie finds the strength to reach out to others and deal with the unresolved relationship of her past. Ravel's frank depiction of grief is stunning in both its silent moments of desperation and the glimpses of hope offered for the future.
