So technically I started this book on New Year’s Eve day but I did not get it finished in time to be a final review of 2019, so here it is as my first review of 2020. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is very much as it has been advertised: an entertaining, yet informative discussion of various questions a mortician has been asked about death and dying.
The one thing that I was not expecting and still kind of doubt is the claim that these are “Big Questions from Tiny Mortals”, meaning questions from children (this isn’t just me interpreting the “tiny” in the cover blurb, it’s also stated in the introduction/preface). Now, I can understand a kid asking the title question (the answer to which is “not right away, and probably not starting with the eyeballs”) and questions about the “stink of death” {both in general and in terms of mummies} or “can I have {insert relative here}’s skull for a keepsake?” (not legally in most states), but some of the others, like “is it true people see a white light as they are dying?” or “can I use bones from cremation as jewelry?” seem just a little beyond the young person scope. Unless “young people” and “tiny mortals” includes teens as well, but that is never clarified. This is not really a bad thing, it’s just a thing I noticed that I wondered about.
Besides the highly conversational and personal tone, the answers to all the 34 questions are pretty easy to understand in terms of technical language. This makes the book a pretty quick and informative read. The nice thing too is that this is something that you can just sit and read. Sometimes books like this, framed as a series of questions and answers, are just too dense to read continuously; not so here.
The other thing that really makes the book worthy of its Goodreads Best in “Science and Technology” win is the illustrations, which have a creepy but cute vibe that reminded me of a cross between manga and Edward Gorey.
If I had one complaint, it’s the Works Cited. A surprising number of the sources listed there are not obviously what might be called “academically reliable” such as blogs. Granted, the author is a trained mortician who has been in the business a while (and thus can probably tell a good source from a disreputable one), and she consults other experts when she doesn’t know something for sure herself. Granted again, it’s entirely possible that the blogs used are genuinely written by experts, but it still looks a little off. Maybe that’s me being source-snobbish but it does make me wonder just a little about certain bits of information.
In any case, this is fun interesting read, which I plan to follow with a novel about ghosts and dead people just because I want to see if I can apply anything learned in the one from to the other. We’ll see.
