Review: "Cat" by Rebecca van Laer

Cat by Rebecca van Laer
Published October 2025 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★

van Laer grew up with cats—cats and dogs and, really, something of a menagerie. More creatures than humans at times. And van Laer loved the dogs...but cats were her first love.

This is one of Object Lessons—a series of short books exploring ordinary objects. Now, whether cats can be called objects is debatable—I don't really think mammals are objects, so I'm going to go no, but Merriam-Webster is actually pretty vague on the subject, so let's run with it. The structure of the books varies, and for better or for worse I have fallen head over heels in love with the ones that are mostly history and research. What can I say? I'm a nerd. A catless-cat-lady nerd, as it happens, so I was hoping for some catnip for nerds.

Cat is largely memoir: an exploration of the cats that have helped to shape van Laer's life, first in childhood and then as an adult. She explores competing stereotypes of cat lovers and dog lovers—and, critically, what she needs in her life to be fulfilled. Numerous cats slink onto and off the page, but she focuses mostly on two: Gus, the cat van Laer brought into her relationship, and Toby, the cat her partner brought in.

I've heard it said that this is the key difference between pet owners: dog people wish their dogs were people; people wish that they were cats. (loc. 96*)

There's a lot of riffing here, which honestly feels kind of right for cats—I suspect that if cats could talk, many of them would be pretty selective about what they talked about...but a significant proportion would be good at riffing on whatever subject caught their attention. I could have used a bit more citation at times—there's a robust enough selection of references, but when van Laer suggests that people are more likely to return cats to shelters than they are to return dogs (she says this in the context of human allergies to pets, though within the context of the chapter it reads as a more general thing), I took myself down something of a rabbit hole to see what the data said. The short answer is that I still don't know, but one of the studies van Laer cites mentions the opposite (lower number of cat returns compared to dogs in study samples), and one of the studies that study cites looked at 3,204 dog relinquishments and 2,755 cat relinquishments, suggesting that there are in fact more dog relinquishments than cat relinquishments (in Denmark)...though this does not tell me whether this is proportional to the numbers of dog owners and cat owners, or pet dogs and cat dogs, or dog and cat adoptions, and I don't know if those numbers are generalizable to the US, so actually my research has done very little except prove that I am, in fact, still a nerd. How's that for a riff?

At any rate. This is a nice little memoir for cat lovers—though with the warning that if you have a hard time with discussions of pet deaths (van Laer talks about more than a few of them), this is likely not the book for you. (I'm generally unfazed by that sort of thing, but know yourself and your reading preferences.) I think I'm left wanting an Object Lessons book about animal shelters—to complete the research I didn't finish!

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.