If you want to talk properly to your cat, or indeed to any cats you may chance to meet, this is the book for you. The author is an academic linguist and here she presents a book which is intended to teach the reader how to speak Cat. It will take three months to get an adequate grasp of this difficult tonal language. The approach is deliberately old-fashioned and grammatical. Each chapter follows the same pattern: a short passage presenting an everyday situation is followed by a vocabulary list and discussion of the various grammatical points raised. Practical spoken and written exercises follow. Much attention is given to avoiding pitfalls that might risk offending Cats.
A couple of examples will give the idea.
Other sections provide various Cat Legends and other historical material.
The book will please those readers whose obsession with cats or Cats (as they are invariably referred to here) matches the author's. Its tone is simultaneously comic and serious; it is probably best labelled a ludibrium, in the sense of the word used by Frances Yates in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.