Rabbi’s Cat

Author: Joann Sfar
Rating:
Reading Level: 8th and up

Pages: 152
Publisher: Pantheon
Edition: Hardcover, 2005

This amusing and thoughtful graphic novel seems to not know whether it exists to answer some really big questions (about life, love, religion, humanity, prejudice, etc.) or to further confuse the readers on all fronts! I love the Cat, and adore the Rabbi. Both are very well-drawn (in text and in pictures) characters. However, I do not take to the way how most of the panels are presented: the illustrations serve as accompaniment to the descriptive paragraphs: very few of them include dialogs between the characters.

It gets to be tedious after a while and the author/illustrator’s voice/hand become too apparent for my taste. Once again, the last part of the “story” seems disjointed from the rest of the book and the sense of lacking a resolution makes me unhappy…