Although the general premise of Loyd Alexander's 1963 novel Time Cat looked both interesting and intriguing enough (as a talking feline with the ability to deliberately and with purpose travel through time sure did sound right up my proverbial alley so to speak), truth be told and sadly, I have seldom found a children's novel this tedious and massively yawn-inducing boring, For while I generally tend to enjoy episodic stories, I have never (and this since childhood) all that much appreciated for

Although the general premise of Loyd Alexander's 1963 novel Time Cat looked both interesting and intriguing enough (as a talking feline with the ability to deliberately and with purpose travel through time sure did sound right up my proverbial alley so to speak), truth be told and sadly, I have seldom found a children's novel this tedious and massively yawn-inducing boring, For while I generally tend to enjoy episodic stories, I have never (and this since childhood) all that much appreciated formulaic repetitiveness. And with that salient fact in mind, I am sorry to say that Time Cat is in my humble opinion nothing BUT the latter, with EVERY single time travelling into history episode commencing with Jason and his feline companion Gareth moving through time to meet some historic person whom they must enlighten about cats, then getting into a threatening situation that is always remedied in the proverbial nick of time and often even through deus ex machina like occurrences at that, only for Jason and Gareth to once again enter into another totally the same type of episode (where basically the only differences are that our time travellers are now residing in a different historical period and have to enlighten another set of people about cats, with the resultant threatening dangers once again being mitigated just before tragedy is about to strike and so on and so on and so on).



And furthermore, the nine historical vignettes of Time Cat (ranging from Ancient Egypt to pre Revolution America), they sadly and annoyingly all (and at least to and for me) remain woefully one-dimensional and are therefore also never really fully developed, realised in an in any manner even remotely descriptive and detailed enough a fashion to satisfy my own personal and academic interest in history (not to mention that the 1600 episode in Germany is also painfully and annoyingly historically inaccurate, for while in the 1500s and 1600s, witch trials and witch burnings were indeed a German phenomenon, they were not EVER as it seems to actually be insinuated by both Jason and Gareth specifically German, as similar such witch crazes with hangings, burnings and other similar horrors were also taking place in France, Austria, Italy, basically in much of what is now considered Western Europe). Combined with an ending that totally seems to just fizzle out, and the annoyingly frustrating truth of the matter that both Jason and Gareth come across as not only rather preachy but also often quite intimidating if not even bullying with regard to "educating" the people they meet during their time travelling adventures about cats (with message-heavy moralising so one-sided that it really almost turns my stomach at times), at best Time Cat has felt like a combination cat and history school lesson, but one that is both tediously dragging and sadly often not even all that factually correct (in other words, no, I have not at ALL enjoyed Time Cat and have found it rather a major waste of my reading time).