The long-awaited sequel to the #1 international bestseller The Cat Who Saved Books—a delightful and heartwarming celebration of books, libraries, cats, and the people who love them.
A chronic asthma condition prevents thirteen-year-old Nanami from playing sports or spending time with her friends after school. But nothing can stop her from one of her favorite activities. Nanami loves to read and happily spends much of her free time in the school library, cocooned among the stacks.
Then one day, Nanami notices that, despite the library being as deserted as ever, some of her favorite books, including literary classics like Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar and Anne of Green Gables are disappearing from the shelves. When she alerts the library staff, they dismiss her concerns. But just as Nanami is about to return to her reading, she spots a suspicious man in a gray suit. Eager to discover what he’s up to, she follows him. The chase is cut short when Nanami suffers an asthma attack. By the time she catches her breath, the man has disappeared and all that is left behind is a mysterious light filtering through the library’s familiar passageways.
That’s when Tiger, the talking tabby cat who saves books, comes to the rescue.
Are Nanami and Tiger prepared to face the dangerous challenges that lie ahead? Why are faceless gray soldiers burning books in a stone castle? And what happened to Rintaro, the socially withdrawn hero who helped Tiger save books in a second-hand bookshop?
At a time of increased book bannings worldwide, Sosuke Natsukawa urges us not to underestimate the power of great literature—and to be prepared to defend our freedom to choose.

My Review:

I picked this up for the obvious. It’s clearly a story about a cat, and books, and at least one library, and I’m there for all of those things. That it’s also the follow-up to The Cat Who Saved Books, which I enjoyed very much for all the above reasons – although that’s about a bookstore rather than a library – certainly helped push this book to the top of my virtually towering TBR pile.

Nanami Kosaki is a bit younger than Rintaro Natsuki was when he began his adventure in that first book. Howsomever, she is also very much a child, or a young woman, on the cusp of the next stage of her own maturity, and she is also holding herself back from taking the next leap forward. Rintaro also faced barriers to that next leap, but in Nanami’s case those hurdles are created not just out of fear, but also out of love. And out of the desire that is so often fostered in females, the desire not to upset the people who are only creating those boundaries and barriers because they love us, believe they know what’s best for us, but want us to be safe above all, even if safety is not what we’re built for.

Nanami has chronic asthma that results in severe attacks that leave her completely debilitated if she is not very, very careful. Nanami, a junior high school student, has internalized that need for care at every step to the point where her world has been reduced to the smallest circle possible; the home she shares with her workaholic father, her school, the local library, and the one and only friend who doesn’t treat her as ‘less than’ in every conversation and at every turn.

Like so many people whose movements are restricted in one way or another, Nanami spends a great deal of time in the world of books – hence her daily visits to her local library. She has learned the wisdom of the saying that “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”

But her thorough knowledge of every nook and cranny of that library tells Nanami that something is wrong. Books are missing. Not the usual ebb and flow of check-in and check-out of a public library but rather that vast swaths of books are disappearing all at once and not coming back.

A situation that absolutely cannot be borne. Which is where Tiger the Tabby steps through the back wall of the library, allowing her to follow the mysterious book thief back to his own world. A place where books aren’t merely burned, but where they are torn from time and space and memory so they lose their power to move the world through the hearts and minds of the people who read them.

Escape Rating B: The US cover of this second book doesn’t do Tiger the Tabby any more justice than the US cover of the first book did. Tiger’s considerably more dignified picture in the UK cover at right also does a much better job of giving Tiger his due.

But this story isn’t about Tiger any more than the first one was. Tiger is an important character, but his function in both stories is to open the way and guide the protagonist – not to lead the charge.

The stakes feel higher in this second book on multiple levels. On one level, it’s about Nanami and her future, just as the first book was about Rin and his. He was on the precipice of choosing between out and in, between rejecting the world and facing it. Nanami’s decision is harder because she’s not so much choosing between safety and adventure as she is choosing between letting her illness and the people who love her take care of her, or figuring out how to face the world as it is and her condition as it is on her own terms. To expand her real horizons to the limit that they can be – a limit that may not be infinite but is considerably larger than feels ‘safe’ to the people who love her and worry about her. She’ll have to stand her own ground against people who truly do mean well, to defend her corner against a world that will push hard to keep her in that corner, even when her asthma exhausts her to the point of passing out.

That the fight that Tiger the Tabby guides her to is, to her, much bigger than the mere fight for life, gives her a springboard of accomplishment from which to wage that fight, but she has to get there first.

Which is where the heart of the story, and the depth of Nanami’s heart, comes in.

Because, while this is about the books, it’s not just about the books. And it’s certainly not about the books as containers – even though it feels that way at first. This is a story about the power of what’s in books to move people – which moves the world.

Which leads even deeper, to a story about power, and how power is applied, and those who feel they have the right to keep their hands on the levers of power. Leading to a story that feels like it’s speaking to this moment, even though this book was published over a year ago in the original Japanese, and was intended to point at the vast (and continuing and increasing) amount of book banning that was – and still is – happening around the world.

In the end, this is a story that focuses hard on the very current debate about whether empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is a strength or a weakness. The forces arrayed against Nanami believe that empathy is a weakness. That reading the ‘wrong’ books fosters empathy and should therefore be eliminated by any means necessary.

Nanami believes the opposite, that empathy is a strength, although she would certainly agree that reading is a powerful force for fostering empathy. And it’s the power of Nanami’s heart, her empathy for others and their empathy for her, that means that she never goes into this battle alone, and that she emerges with new strength, a whole heart, and a whole lot of books, when her battle is won.

But it’s clear at the end that the war is not over. As it is not in the real world. Nanami seems to have found her road to her OWN future at the end of this story, and we get a glimpse of Rintaro’s life as it is now to see that he also reached out and grabbed his own happiness and fulfillment, but Tiger the Tabby is still out there, just waiting to guide a new hero to the next front of this neverending conflict.