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Love Saves the Day

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Homer’s Odyssey comes a tender, joyful, utterly unforgettable novel, primarily told through the eyes of the most observant member of any human family: the cat.
Humans best understand the truth of things if they come at it indirectly. Like how sometimes the best way to catch a mouse that’s right in front of you is to back up before you pounce.
So notes Prudence, the irresistible brown tabby at the center of Gwen Cooper’s tender, joyful, utterly unforgettable novel, which is mostly told through the eyes of this curious (and occasionally cranky) feline.
When five-week-old Prudence meets a woman named Sarah in a deserted construction site on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she knows she’s found the human she was meant to adopt. For three years their lives are filled with laughter, tuna, catnaps, music, and the unchanging routines Prudence craves. Then one day Sarah doesn’t come home. From Prudence’s perch on the windowsill she sees Laura, the daughter who hardly ever comes to visit Sarah, arrive with her new husband. They’re carrying boxes. Before they even get to the front door, Prudence realizes that her life has changed forever.
Suddenly Prudence finds herself living in a strange apartment with humans she barely knows. It could take years to train them in the feline courtesies and customs (for example, a cat should always be fed before the humans, and at the same exact time every day) that Sarah understood so well. Prudence clings to the hope that Sarah will come back for her while Laura, a rising young corporate attorney, tries to push away memories of her mother and the tumultuous childhood spent in her mother’s dusty downtown record store. But the secret joys, past hurts, and life-changing moments that make every mother-daughter relationship special will come to the surface. With Prudence’s help Laura will learn that the past, like a mother’s love, never dies.
Poignant, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Love Saves the Day is a story of hope, healing, and how the love of an animal can make all of us better humans. It’s the story of a mother and daughter divided by the turmoil of bohemian New York, and the opinionated, irrepressible feline who will become the bridge between them. It’s a novel for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one, wondered what their cat was really thinking, or fallen asleep with a purring feline nestled in their arms. Prudence, a cat like no other, is sure to steal your heart.
Praise for Love Saves the Day
 
“Prudence [is a] sassy but sensitive feline heroine.”—Time
“Unforgettably moving . . . a hard one to put down.”—Modern Cat
 
“If you are the Most Important Person to a cat, you will hold them much tighter by the book’s end. If you don’t have a cat, Prudence will have surreptitiously lured you into the danger zone: Falling in love with a cat because they need family, too.”—The Vancouver Sun
 
“Cooper brings readers a fictional tale that cat lovers will treasure. . . . This book will make most readers laugh and cry, and probably lead them to wonder more often what, exactly, their pet is thinking.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance–Star
 
“The interspersed viewpoints . . . enrich Cooper’s sensitively told novel that unravels a story (based on actual events) about a century-old tenement building—and the inhabitants therein. That story...
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 4, 2013
      Prudence the cat is the dominant of three narrators in this jumbled tale about the ways a cat handles it's a change of ownership. Prudence is trying to get comfortable in a new home with former owner Sarah's daughter, Laura, and her husband, Josh. Typical Prudence wisdom goes something like this: "Humans need holidays and calendars to tell them things cats already knowâlike when summer ends." Sarah and Laura, on the other hand, have a tale to tell, about living in poverty and losing belongings and the people they have each loved along the way. Sarah, a DJ in the 1970s who bought a record store on a whim, had Laura at 19 and raised her in a rent-controlled apartment on New York's Lower East Side. Cooper (Homer's Odyssey) folds into her narrative a controversial 1998 demolition of a New York City tenement that displaced a number of residents. It's difficult, however, to discern the book's plot, with a cat's childlike worldview butting up against more kaleidoscopic narrators, resulting in a head-spinning loss of direction that hobbles this potentially endearing novel. Agent: Michelle Rubin, Writers House.

    • Kirkus

      December 15, 2012
      The tumultuous life of a cat spans the equally turbulent lives of the mother and daughter who share her always-changing New York City existence. Prudence the tabby never expected to find the right human. Living alone in a deserted construction site on the Lower East Side, she's drawn first to Sarah's singing: As a feral kitten, music is new to her. And while she quickly gets used to the idea of having a "roommate," as she puts it, Sarah's irregular lifestyle means that meals can't be counted on. When Sarah finally disappears one day, Prudence is taken in by Laura, Sarah's daughter, and her husband and trades a bohemian existence for more conventional comforts. But as the tabby learns, even life on the Upper West Side can have its ups and downs. Not only does she witness the aftereffects of Sarah and Laura's often strained relationship, she runs into danger in the form of an innocent-seeming bouquet. Initially presented in the first-person by the cat, this book by Cooper (Homer's Odyssey, 2009) achieves a matter-of-fact directness that only occasionally veers into cutesiness ("[S]ometimes Sarah eats things that are just plain gross. There's one kind of food, called 'cookies'...") But Prudence's scope is insufficient to convey the entirety of this New-York-in-the-'90s saga, and by the book's second half, human narratives begin to take over. While these are often affecting--relating the different sides of the mother-daughter struggle--they seem to come from a different book. And real-life events, notably the city-ordered demolition of a tenement with some of the occupants' pets left inside, are not convincingly woven into the narrative. The result is moving but uneven, and even a feel-good ending from the cat's viewpoint can't pull the story back together. The follow-up to an international best-seller starts off well but falls apart under its own best intentions.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      December 15, 2012
      When Sarah, her human roommate, doesn't return to their apartment after a few days, Prudence, a former city street kitten who has grown used to an indoor life of relative luxury, worries. But when Sarah's semi-estranged daughter, Laura, and her husband, Josh, arrive, armed with storage boxes, trash bags, and the always-ominous cat carrier, Prudence really starts to panic. The concept of human death is one Prudence is unfamiliar with, so she keeps her sense memories of Sarah alive in hopes one day she'll return, all the while learning to cope with two strangers whose newlywed status provides perplexing new human behaviors to figure out. Sarah's death is equally problematic for Laura, who still harbors resentment and shame from her precarious childhood in the slums of New York's Lower East Side. In this poignant tale of loss and regret, Cooper, the best-selling author of Homer's Odyssey (2009), once again demonstrates her compassionate fluency in felinespeak and proves equally adept at conveying complex human emotions with flair and sensitivity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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