Tamiu: A Cat’s Tale
Angelino Donnachaidh
North Street Book Prize 2024 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Middle Grade
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Angelino Donnachaidh's wise and winsome novel Tamiu: A Cat's Tale is that magical book that's clear and concise enough for middle-grade readers, while containing deep lessons for adults to ponder. In this sense it reminded me of Walter Wangerin Jr.'s The Book of the Dun Cow, another animal allegory about virtue and heroism, and also Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet.
Finely detailed soft pencil illustrations by Fiorella Ikeue are equally good at expressing the animal characters' mythic and naturalistic qualities. They're never too cutesy, yet a human-level intelligence shines through the creatures' eyes. Tamiu looks most like an African Wildcat with respect to her facial shape and lean stripey body. Her journey takes her across multiple biomes where she learns from the lifeways of wolves, lions, buffalo, apes, bears, mice, and early humans, all drawn with expressiveness and accuracy.
Tamiu: A Cat's Tale is a work of political philosophy. How can small creatures stay safe in a world of predators and natural disasters? What is the most effective form of social organization? How much freedom should one trade for security? These questions drive the young wildcat to leave her forest clan in search of knowledge.
Traumatized by a fire that destroyed her previous home, Tamiu is disappointed in her fellow cats' lack of cooperation, which keeps them on the margin of mere survival. Sages (wise elder cats) visiting their territory tell her about far-away lions and tigers, cat relatives who are stronger than her tribe. Tamiu resolves to become a lion!
However, her majestic cousins live far away, so she must find temporary shelter with a succession of other animal societies, from which she learns that every value system has serious trade-offs. Wolf packs are close-knit and efficient, with strong leadership, but losers in the battle for dominance become outcasts who will likely starve. Apes are clever but quarrelsome, envying the prosperity of the early humans who have begun domesticating other species. Even the mice are not to be underestimated, since a coordinated nest of them can ambush a certain cat who's gotten too soft.
The concept of "work" comes into the world with the humans, an advancement that's also a kind of fall from grace, as animals are drawn away from an instinctive to a transactional lifestyle, performing tasks that have no inherent meaning to them in exchange for food and shelter. Tamiu is seduced by this bargain for awhile, until the humbling encounter with those mice. Humans have tamed fire, her old nemesis, but their greed for territory leads them to make war on the lions, unsuccessfully. Reminded of her original quest, Tamiu goes back into the wilderness to learn from the big cats.
Finally she gets lonely being the only one of her species wherever she goes, and returns to the forest as a Sage. The cycle starts again, with younger cats needing to learn for themselves that human magic "is bottomless—it controls you from the inside, and it takes away your freedom." What Tamiu discovered is that no species has all the answers. Being in charge is temporary and never without its price. That's a lesson that human beings still haven't learned.
The physical book was well-constructed, with elegant chapter headings and an easy-to-read layout. The back cover design had large blocks of light-colored type against a dark background, which strains the eyes after awhile. The book had clean copy with no notable typos. My only criticism is that younger readers might be confused by the number of different habitats that Tamiu traverses on foot, since in reality these environments would be thousands of miles apart. It's a fable, but it otherwise strives for accuracy about animal behavior, so adults should be ready to clarify the liberties taken by the author. This is a beautiful little book that will reveal new things to its readers as they grow in life experience.
Read an excerpt from Tamiu: A Cat's Tale (PDF)
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