If you are sensitive to detailed descriptions of various illnesses baby cats can get, charts and verbal descriptions of poop, blood and other bodily fluids, pictures of kitty rear-ends (used to illustrate how to tell a male from a female), kittens not surviving some rough things, then you may not want to read Tiny but Mighty: Kitten Lady’s Guide to Saving the Most Vulnerable Felines. If you like pictures of baby kitties (often in colorful paper hats), many success stories of little kitties surviving against the odds, more information than you probably want unless you either do or plan to foster about health and care of infant cats, and plenty of personal observations and advice about advocacy, then maybe you should read the book.
This really is a manual, and it’s largely organized by stages of development, both physical and social. I have always been a cat person, and although I do not foster (my 13-year old cat has been an only kitty her whole life, and I’m not willing to risk stressing her or otherwise taking a new arrival badly), I still found plenty of information interesting. You usually don’t see kittens as young as the ones the focus on the book (newborns up to about 6 weeks) unless your cat is the mama, and that’s mostly what I found interesting. There is plenty about care and needs of slightly older kittens, but it’s the real babies who get the most attention. There are also quite a few photos and descriptions of equipment (like bottles and syringes, heating pads, etc) on its own as well as in use.
This reads sort of like a textbook which is essentially is, but the information is often presented in a personal way, since the author learned largely through experience. She says straight up at one point that she has not been to vet school, but she works closely with veterinarians, and she’s been fostering and working with neonate kittens for a long time. A lot of what is presented seems like opinion as a result, which sometimes it is, but other times, it feels a little less like direct information and more like an invitation to check out other resources to verify. That’s almost a weakness to me but then again, it does match the style of the memoir/guide. And sometimes the informal tone helps with some of the humor, like describing the results of a kitten surgery as said kitten now in possession of a “brand-new designer butt-hole”.
On the one hand, this probably is a good guide for people who might be thinking about fostering kittens or who are casually interested in the subject. On the other, I’m glad this was a library book that I did not have to pay for. The one only genuine disappointment for me is that there was no mention of Grandpa Mason, whose Facebook page was what introduced me to the author. I know he was never a kitten when she had Mason at her rescue, but he did interact with a lot of the kittens who did come through (granted, mostly the older ones, but still, he had such an inspiring story).
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